Video choppiness on 2.3Ghz 2011 Mini when Lion's virtual display is active

[indiekiduk]

So a great new feature in Lion is you can have a mini hooked up to your HDTV viewing one account for watching movies and can also remote login under another account to do other work-like things. Unfortunately when set up like this when you play videos on the HDTV they are choppy, e.g. 720p x264 movies played in VLC. If you log out of the 2nd virtual display then the choppiness disappears. The CPU usage is low, 8GB memory and lots free, the disk read speed is fine and I increased the VLC file buffer. So a possible conclusion is that the Intel GMA 3000 doesn't have the power to drive 2 displays (even 1 only being virtual) and show 720p x264.

I was wondering if anyone with the 2.5Ghz with the discrete Radeon could try this out and see if maybe the issue is something else.

 

[indg]

it could be your wifi router choking. on the screen sharing app, under the View menu, select Adaptive Quality. that should lower the bandwidth needed. i see anywhere from 1MB/s to 1.8MB/s (or 8Mbps to 15Mbps) on Adaptive Quality. if Full Quality is selected, that jumps to 9-10MB/s (or 72-80Mbps). most routers might have trouble handling that in a typical home environment.

i tested on i7 server which only has intel hd 3000 connected to 24" lcd over mdp-to-dvi and vizio tv over hdmi playing 1080p big buck bunny on vlc. screen sharing connected with an old macbook pro (snow leopard) and the video looked smooth on the mbp.

 

[indiekiduk]

the video is choppy on the hdtv which is the main display on the mini, the video is on the local hard drive.

 

[indg]

i tried again with my mbp booted up in lion (external backup) and connected via virtual display mode and it showed the login screen on my mbp, but i couldn't click on any of the user account icons on the login screen. then i tried flipping to hardware display/virtual display in the menu and it went to the password entry screen, but then got the pinwheel of death and was basically unresponsive for several minutes so i had to do a hard reboot. that's not a good sign.

i think virtual display screen sharing in lion is a bit wonky. when snow leopard first came out it had issues with "back to my mac". i wouldn't be surprised if 10.7.1 fixes the virtual display issues. i don't think the problem is lack of gpu processing power.

 

[Santabean2000]

This is an example of why I avoided the Intel graphics; they might be fine... but I just don't trust them.

For a few extra bucks I liked the idea of getting something more robust. The better processor and extra RAM are just a bonus.

 

[indg]

it hasn't been determined yet whether it's a hd3000 problem or a lion issue. no one with a 6630m has tested the virtual display yet.

 

[indiekiduk]

I hope someone can test it soon. For now I've gone back to using the ATV2 and XBMC for watching movies and only using the main display on the mini remotely.

 

[Kenc1103]

I have the exact same problem with my quad-core mini server. Once I remote in, the main screen will freeze up and the only way to get it moving is to log out of the remote session. Apple needs to fix that.