Tip: Playing 1080p MKVs smoothly

[hasbean]

I've been searching 'till I was blue in the face on how to play 1080p MKVs smoothly to no avail. Couldn't understand why my Macbook Pro stuttered.

However, I found a lonely, abandoned post on the Perian forums asking me to install avc1Decoder from http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3

So all I did was copy the component to /Library/Quicktime and installed the prefPane. Blam, the MKV was playing absolutely perfectly under Quicktime with no hitches! I thought I'd post this here and spread the info. Heck, maybe even a Mac Mini would stand a chance now?

My hardware: MBP 2.4ghz with 4g ram under Leopard.

 

[catachip]

I'd be interested to hear the mileage people get with this one. I have a 2.4 Ghz MBP with 4 GB of Ram and a 256 mb video card. 720p mkvs play fine in Quicktime (+Perian) and VLC. 1080p mkvs stutter in both of them.

I'll give this a try when I get home - anyone else already give it a shot?

 

[speakerwizard]

as soon as i get an .mkv i usually export it in quicktime as mp4 with passthrough video (just rips the h264 in the mp4 no loss of quality) and encode the audio into aac, only takes a few minutes and its more mac friendly, not to mention appletv.

 

[jjahshik32]

I dont use perian but do use vlc player and it plays all 1080p in mkv/h264 just fine without any stuttering in my 2.4Ghz macbook.

Also I just install flip4mac, never touched perian.

 

[Blubbert]

On my 2.5 Ghz Penryn 17'', 1080p plays without stuttering or any problems in MPlayer. Quicktime can play 1080p too but you have to wait for it to load and its a generally worse experience than MPlayer.

 

[alphaod]

VLC plays everything.

 

[hasbean]

I just noticed that not all 1080p h264 mkvs stutter. For those problematic MKVs, however, give this tip a go.

 

[yarinb]

VLC Stuttering

Sorry i'm breaking into an open door here, but does anyone ever had any stuttering while playing regular divx .avi movies?

I have a brand new penryn with a clean Leopard installation, and on VLC sometimes movies will stutter for a few seconds from time to time.
It is very irritating while watching a movie.

All i could find in the logs are the following error messages while the stuttering occurs:

May  9 00:25:44 MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0x4887f00]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (3c00,3b59)
May  9 00:25:50 MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0x4887f00]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (3c0f,31fa)->(3c11,2c48).

Anyone else having stutters in VLC/Quicktime?

Yarin

 

[alphaod]

Sorry i'm breaking into an open door here, but does anyone ever had any stuttering while playing regular divx .avi movies?

I have a brand new penryn with a clean Leopard installation, and on VLC sometimes movies will stutter for a few seconds from time to time.
It is very irritating while watching a movie.

All i could find in the logs are the following error messages while the stuttering occurs:

May  9 00:25:44 MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0x4887f00]::clipIfNecessary() - adjusting clipped position to (3c00,3b59)
May  9 00:25:50 MacBook-Pro kernel[0]: IOAudioStream[0x4887f00]::clipIfNecessary() - Error: attempting to clip to a position more than one buffer ahead of last clip position (3c0f,31fa)->(3c11,2c48).

Anyone else having stutters in VLC/Quicktime?

Yarin

Yes sometimes, but it's usually an encoding error. I can download a movie or encode myself. When I watch the downloaded version it might stutter, so encode my own with the same settings and it works fine.

 

[yarinb]

I was thinking actually in that direction... but too many movies stutter on the MBP while running just fine on Linux/WinXP VLC (even on my XBMC Xbox machine).