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UHD video 2016 on MBP 2016 not possible?

D

don_neo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 30, 2016
8
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I have a MBP 2016 with 3,1 Ghz I5 CPU. I'm trying to play a 2160 UHD which is about 60GB. However when I try to play it it just keeps on freezing. If I look in the activity monitor the CPU is overloaded. Is the MBP just not powerful enough or am I doing something wrong?
 
What do you mean "trying to play a 2160 UHD"? Are you playing a game? Or a video? If video, how are you playing it? In your browser, in VLC, QuickTime, how?
 
My maxed out Late 2013 15" has no problem playing uHD 2160p content with VLC. It also plays 1080p 360-degree videos.
Heck, I even watched Deadpool 2160p connected to my Samsung 4K TV - the laptop was powering both the built-in Retina display and the TV. I am really impressed with this machine in scenarios like this, considering it's 3 years old.

But here's the thing - even if your machine is 3 years newer, you still have a chipset and a dual-core i5, so maybe your 13" can't keep up. I suggest looking into the 15" line if you want to enjoy this kind of media.
 
If its freezing than your video is corrupted and/or you hit a bug in VLC. As others have suggested, try a different video player.
 
Thanks for your help guys... I tried it with a different rip and different players with no effect. Macbook keeps on getting stuck with CPU at 100%
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hamiltonDSi said:
My maxed out Late 2013 15" has no problem playing uHD 2160p content with VLC. It also plays 1080p 360-degree videos.
Heck, I even watched Deadpool 2160p connected to my Samsung 4K TV - the laptop was powering both the built-in Retina display and the TV. I am really impressed with this machine in scenarios like this, considering it's 3 years old.
Click to expand...

Really? Well even for Youtube in 4K it's using about 80% of the cpu cores
this one for example;
It really seams like it's just not able to handel a proper 4K rip. Would it be because the 15inch has a external graphics card in stead of integrated intel graphics?
 
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Are you watching that youtube example from your MacBook screen or from the external display when it uses 80% of cpu?

I just checked that link, played it as a full screen on my MacBook Pro 13"/2016 (the highest quality that was possible to choose) and no issues here... cpu was around 10% for youtube, sometimes had a short peak around 35% but mostly when playing the vid, it was around 10%.
 
I don't understand at all what is going on. This is a screenshot of the CPU load for that youtube 4K play in full screen;

Screen_Shot_2016_12_30_at_11_11_47.png
 
Safari does not seem to support 4K. Maybe thats the reason you see only 10% cpu. Still my initial question remains... Is the 13'' MBP 2016 just not capable of playing a 4K rip...
 
Sound like you CPU decode, skylake has hardware HVEC264 @ 60Hz, 240MBps support.
 
Try other 4K YouTube vids which work with Safari and compare the Load with Firefox and Chrome ;-)

e.g. California drone flight
 
Ok so it works fine and stable in safari. Max 15% GPU load. So that has to mean that indeed in safari is decoded by the GPU instead and in Chrome it uses the CPU?

So back to the initial problem, how could I make that a rip that I have is decoded by the GPU in VLC ?
 
I tried Chrome aswell.. plays that example video without stuttering (max setting was 2160p).. However, total cpu load was around 50% +-5% while google chrome helper had a high cpu usage...

Anyway, because that example video wasn't able to be played 2160p in safari, I tried another one:
Both browsers - safari and chrome - played this vid at 2160p but Chrome helper again was consuming cpu.
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don_neo said:
So back to the initial problem, how could I make that a rip that I have is decoded by the GPU in VLC ?
Click to expand...

Open VLC, go to Preferences -> input/codecs -> check that hardware acceleration is "automatic".
 
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hardware acceleration is "automatic" or "VDA" has no effect still CPU overload
 
don_neo said:
Ok so it works fine and stable in safari. Max 15% GPU load. So that has to mean that indeed in safari is decoded by the GPU instead and in Chrome it uses the CPU?
Click to expand...

Yep. YouTube serves VP9 encoded videos to Chrome, and H264 content to Safari. You can check this by right-clicking the video, then choosing "stats for nerds". For Chrome, the line "Mime Type" will say something like: video/webm; codecs="vp9" and for Safari, it'll say something like: video/mp4; codecs="avc1.640028"

VP9 is not accelerated, but H264 is. There is a political/patent game going on here.

There's a plugin for Chrome that's called "h264ify". It'll save some CPU:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal
 
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This is from VLC:
"Mac OS X: Video Decoding Acceleration (VDA) comes with MacOS X.6.3 and later (see API). This is somewhat supported in VLC 2.1.0. Only H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) is supported currently."
 
chrome has gotten incredibly sloppy & heavy & slow over the years

just like firefox did

can't wait for the next 3rd party browser trend to come along ...
 
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