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PowerBook 1.67 can't handle HD 1080 trailers..

AlBDamned

AlBDamned

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Mar 14, 2005
2,641
15
That's twice this week I've tried watching downloaded HD trailers through Quicktime and both times they've been stuttery and unwatchable.

Very annoying. Is it likely just the PowerBook or something else rotten in Denmark? Smaller trailers play fine.
 
Nope, sorry, not gonna happen. There are some 720p trailers that I cant seem to watch on my PB 1.67, although I dont seem to have trouble editing 720 or 1080 HDV, its just playing it back thats the problem.
 
Multimedia said:
You are getting a stong hint from that attempt, it's time to move on to the next big thing. :eek: :)
Click to expand...

Probably a new iMac or even a Mac Pro to be honest, Multimedia.

My PowerBook is pretty banged up and all the boxes, boot discs and non-essential accessories are stored in a garage in the UK. I don't think it would be worth selling and I'd probably prefer to keep it and splurge on a new machine at some stage.

It's academic at the moment though - my girlfriend and I just bought new sofas this past weekend ;). I'll just have to stick with lower-res trailers...

NorthernMunky said:
Nope, sorry, not gonna happen. There are some 720p trailers that I cant seem to watch on my PB 1.67, although I dont seem to have trouble editing 720 or 1080 HDV, its just playing it back thats the problem.
Click to expand...

You'd think a completely maxed out last rev. PowerBook would be able to handle it, but clearly it's not the case.

Not tried the other HD resolutions to my knowledge. It's just coincidence that I tried watching the Pirates 3 trailer and the Transformers trailer in 1080 and it just couldn't handle it.

I'm gutted too, as my brother who I live with has also just got a new 42" HDTV plasma and I've been blown away by the quality of the picture, so now I want to watch everything in similar resolution but the poor old (only 14 months old...) laptop can't do it.

Maybe a PS3 would be good in the interim LOL.
 
that kind of makes me want to cry, but i too will have to say goodbye.

who am I kidding, I can't wait until this summer when I pick out a new machine wahooo!
 
That is really sad. I have a 1.67 myself. I don't have any trouble usually watching hd from my eyetv hybrid. Maybe its an H.264 thing. That gives me an excuse to download a trailer tonite and try it. For the most part I find my powerbook faster than my mini, but I know it really isn't. I am a big PPC fan still and it is sad to see the fastest PPC laptop system becoming obsolete. I will check this and make sure there isn't a workaround.
 
Don't feel so bad. I have a PC running Windows XP with an ATI X800XT AIW card, 1 GB dual channel ram and an Athlon 64 overclocked to 2.52ghz. It can't handle 1080p video either (the short trailers usually work fine, but a movie will stutter and eventually stop playing after 2 or 3 minutes). Happily though, my MBP 2.16 C2D runs 1080p movies flawlessly. I have a feeling that my Windows box is powerful enough to play 1080p videos (maybe I should try and push it to 2.8 or 2.9ghz) but the Windows installation is almost 2 years old and the system's way overdue for a reformat...part of the reason I bought a Mac...I hate having my PC gradually get slower and slower as time goes by. Hopefully Macs dont' have that problem. If they do, I hope it's easier to fix than a complete reinstall of the OS (already did that once due to messing up some settings, and it takes forever to install OS X, BootCamp, Windows XP, and Parallels).
 
AlBDamned said:
You'd think a completely maxed out last rev. PowerBook would be able to handle it, but clearly it's not the case.
Click to expand...

Why would you think that? Decoding high res H.264 has always been about having lots of CPU resources. When HD trailers first hit Apple.com, the min specs for 720p were a single 1.8GHz G5 or better, for 1080p were a dual 2.0GHz G5 or better, and were never advertised any differently. G4's were never under the HD H.264-capable umbrella.
 
killmoms said:
Why would you think that? Decoding high res H.264 has always been about having lots of CPU resources. When HD trailers first hit Apple.com, the min specs for 720p were a single 1.8GHz G5 or better, for 1080p were a dual 2.0GHz G5 or better, and were never advertised any differently. G4's were never under the HD H.264-capable umbrella.
Click to expand...

I would think that because I hadn't looked at the specs for watching video trailers specifically and these two trailers weren't on Apple.com.

With pretty much every single trailer running fine up until these, it was a surprise to be directed to two in one week that simply wouldn't work. There wasn't any warning that "as of 19th March you will not be able to watch trailers you've been linked to unless you have XX spec computer."

Most things run absolutely fine on this machine, even Halo believe it or not.
 
Except it's not "as of March 19th," it's "as of the first time we ever put H.264 HD trailers on Apple.com," which was been a couple YEARS now. The PowerBooks have never been able to decode HD H.264, even when they were the fastest Pro laptops available from Apple—that was my point. That's why there are 480p versions of the trailers available, which play back just fine on a PowerBook (even the one in my sig :)).

I guess I'm not understanding why you think this is some recent development.
 
killmoms said:
Except it's not "as of March 19th," it's "as of the first time we ever put H.264 HD trailers on Apple.com," which was been a couple YEARS now. The PowerBooks have never been able to decode HD H.264, even when they were the fastest Pro laptops available from Apple—that was my point. That's why there are 480p versions of the trailers available, which play back just fine on a PowerBook (even the one in my sig :)).

I guess I'm not understanding why you think this is some recent development.
Click to expand...

I appreciate that it's not a new development in the great scheme of things, but what I'm saying is that up until the first time this happened (not being able to play a trailer) which was last WEEK, the problem had never cropped up.

Up till then I'd not been directed straight to a 1080 HD clip. That's the point. Both trailers seem to be from Yahoo, incidentally.

I think when viewing trailers on Apple.com, I'd always tended to choose smaller versions because the big ones take so damn long to download for a simple trailer (even on a 16Mb connection) that it's not worth the time.

Thus when directed to a trailer where there's no choice about size, it was surprising to find it didn't work. Without looking into it too much, I'd have thought off the bat it would work, but clearly, given the specs Apple recommends, it shouldn't. But, because it had never happened before, I'd had no reason to investigate the problem before.

Do you see where I'm coming from? I'm not sure I can explain it any clearer that. :)
 
Saying all this, it actually works if you scale down the screen size (see below), but the processor is practically frying itself to keep up. Ah well....

*goes and puts first $10 in "New Mac savings account"*
 

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If given the option to get something in 720p or 1080p, get the 720p. You won't notice a difference worth keeping - very minor sharpness if anything at all if you look at the screen closely.

My MacBook Pro sometimes struggles with 720p HD content - fair enough it plays it and it's quite smooth, but it aint no constant 24fps for sure.

But saying that, even most HD tv's seem to struggle with HD content at a constant 24fps - there is an ever so slightly noticable stuttering when there is a lot of change happening on screen.

Early technology.
 
No present computer, Mac or PC, has native decoding of H.264 in the video chip. All H.264 decoding is handled by the main processor, with DRAWING assistance by the video chip. No decoding assistance. This means that H.264 video plays exactly the same on a 2.0 GHz MacBook with GMA 950 graphics as it would on a 2.0 GHz iMac with an nVidia 7600GT (if you could do that processor/video chip combination,) as it would on a 2.0 GHz single-processor Mac Pro with an ATI X1900XT or a Quadro FX 4500. (Again, if you could get that configuration. Although, realistically, the faster front side bus of the Mac Pro would help a LITTLE.)

The reason you can edit HDV just fine, but not play H.264 is because HDV is based on MPEG-2, which isn't as demanding as H.264. The requirements (from Apple,) to play H.264 are as follows:
480p video (852x480, 24 fps): 1.25 GHz G4 or higher (I can confirm that these play fine on a 1.25 GHz eMac.)
720p video (1280x720, 24 or 30 fps): 1.8 GHz G5 or 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo. I can say that a dual 1.42 GHz G4 barely squeaks by on this, and a 1.66 GHz Core Duo works fine, but a Core Solo is at a loss.
1080p video (1920x1080, 24 fps): Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 or Core Duo. This is firm. It does not play well on a 1.8 GHz dual G5, or a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. And any single-processor machine, don't even think about it.

If you can transcode the video, try putting it in MPEG-4 or MPEG-2. Both are less demanding to decode than H.264, but take up more space for equivalent quality.
 
On the plus side it lloks like leopard will do H.264 far better. On the developer site they say that Quicktime is undergoing serious replumbing. After who knows all the systems that achieve the requirements might play these videos. Maybe I'm dreaming :)
 
ehurtley said:
No present computer, Mac or PC, has native decoding of H.264 in the video chip.
Click to expand...

Time to update this...

The nVidia 8x00 series (EXCEPT the top-of-the-line 8800, oddly) do have full H.264 acceleration. I don't know if OS X takes advantage of it or not, though. I suppose someone could see how much processor power is used on the 2.2 GHz Santa Rosa/nVidia 8600 MacBook Pro and compare it to the previous 2.16 GHz ATI MacBook Pro. If it uses significantly less CPU time, then OS X is using the video chip for decoding.
 
Use Aticellerator 2...

my ibook g4 1.2 ghz used to not be able to play youtube videos and the like.

Downloaded that, cranked up my graphics to +15% and it can now play them quite smoothly.

I've had it like this for over a year now, everything runs perfectly.

I'm sure for your computer it would work wonders.
 
iW00t said:
What's the point?

None of the Macs output in HDMI. It is like buying a muscle car in a state where cops shoot to kill speeders on sight.
Click to expand...

Exactly.

Playing HD trailers isn't the biggest priority for everyone.

Rich.
 
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