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program to watch hd movies?

twoodcc

twoodcc

macrumors P6
Original poster
what program would i use to watch an hd movie clip? i have VLC, but i'm having trouble. it's so slow you can't even watch it. i'm watching on my brand new 15" powerbook (1.67 ghz G4, 512mb ram, etc). surely it's not too slow to just watch the clip?
 
Is it an h.264 clip? If so you need at least a G5.


Lethal

EDIT: Keep in mind that after DVDs were main stream it took a few years before computers could play them back w/o hardware assistance.
 
i'm not sure exactly what it is, but windows media player can play it on my pc. i think it's mpeg4, yuv420p, 1280x720, 23.98 fps. so what does all that mean?
 
also, if i somehow burn something that's hd on a regular dvd-r, will it encode it back to mpeg-2, which really defeats the purpose of hd?
 
thats why HD is a joke IMO, only broadcast (digital cable) has it.

There is no other HD content, anywhere.

HD-DVDs, noexistent in america and will be for a long time...

So yeah, going from a HDTV rip (1280x720 etc resolution movie file) to a DVD-R would drop the quality (720x480 anamorphic) but it is always better to have a high resolution file and make that into a lower res, than vice versa of course. Assuming of course you are ENCODING this HD file into a DVD you are making and not just copying a .mov to a DVD-R, cuz that still an HD movie but not playable on anything but a computer.

But yeah, it defeats the purpose of HD to burn them onto DVDs, there is no standard for anything but 720x480 (with anamorphic for 16x9)
 
Sdashiki said:
thats why HD is a joke IMO, only broadcast (digital cable) has it.

There is no other HD content, anywhere.

HD-DVDs, noexistent in america and will be for a long time...

So yeah, going from a HDTV rip (1280x720 etc resolution movie file) to a DVD-R would drop the quality (720x480 anamorphic) but it is always better to have a high resolution file and make that into a lower res, than vice versa of course. Assuming of course you are ENCODING this HD file into a DVD you are making and not just copying a .mov to a DVD-R, cuz that still an HD movie but not playable on anything but a computer.

But yeah, it defeats the purpose of HD to burn them onto DVDs, there is no standard for anything but 720x480 (with anamorphic for 16x9)
Click to expand...

thanks for replying. yeah that's what i thought. so why should i even have anything in HD if i can't even watch it on my new powerbook? i'm not happy about that at all. is VLC the only program i can use?
 
twoodcc said:
thanks for replying. yeah that's what i thought. so why should i even have anything in HD if i can't even watch it on my new powerbook? i'm not happy about that at all. is VLC the only program i can use?
Click to expand...


I know this might sound ridiculous, but... If you really want to watch HD on you PB, you might want to export the video to MPEG-4 (less processor intensive than H.264) OR Lower the bitrate on the H.264 file.
 
blaskillet4 said:
I know this might sound ridiculous, but... If you really want to watch HD on you PB, you might want to export the video to MPEG-4 (less processor intensive than H.264) OR Lower the bitrate on the H.264 file.
Click to expand...

how would i do that?
 
LethalWolfe said:
Is it an h.264 clip? If so you need at least a G5.
Click to expand...

I could *almost* watch 720p on my 1.25 GHz G4. I'd be surprised if a 1.67 can't handle it.

Try using QuickTime Player instead of VLC, it might have better optimisations.
 
twoodcc said:
also, if i somehow burn something that's hd on a regular dvd-r, will it encode it back to mpeg-2, which really defeats the purpose of hd?
Click to expand...
If the movie clip file is small enough you should definitely be able to burn it in its native format on DVD+/-R as long as you keep it in data format. You would only need to transcode it to SD MPEG-2 if you wanted to be able to play it on a standalone DVD player. There are a growing number of standalone DVD players that will also handle MPEG-4, so you might even be able to just lower the bitrate and resolution to make it playable on some DVD players.

QT Pro is definitely a good tool for this.

B
 
Lottarex said:
Is it possible to do that with Toast Titanium?
Click to expand...

Maybe you'd want to ask this in another thread, this one is too old that probably you won't get an answer soon.

BTW: Spolier for this thread: Apple switched to intel and The Beatles are finally in iTunes 😀
 
BTW: Spolier for this thread: Apple switched to intel and The Beatles are finally in iTunes 😀
Click to expand...

Hah...and the Beatles have been in my iTunes library for several years. I guess it helps somewhat owning every studio album they ever did. 😎
 
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