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Why can't my Macbook play 1080p videos?
Zoolander
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have a 2.0GHz C2D Macbook. 1080p videos are stutter-y and crappy. Even the trailers from Apple's site.
Is this normal? I know the video card in this thing is lame, but shouldn't a 2GHz C2D be able to play 1080p videos?
Is this normal? I know the video card in this thing is lame, but shouldn't a 2GHz C2D be able to play 1080p videos?
Zoolander on
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I used VLC, which was truly horrible. Plex was a little better. For Apple's trailers, I used Quicktime, which was probably the smoothest, but it constantly slows down on visually complex scenes.
http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/
http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/
it's so good.
GT: Tanky the Tank
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Have you tried this in Windows? I haven't thought to yet, but I strongly suspect it will work just fine. I'm hoping Snow Leopard resolves just whatever the fuck is wrong.
HD video has next to no dependency on your video card unless you're powering a gigantic display with a GMA950 and that issue would be a fill rate limitation. Only the brand new MacBooks use a hardware H.264 decoder, all other machines do it all in software.
I'll have to give mplayer extended a try.
I changed VLC settings, quick time plugins and other players, but nothing besides Plex played 1080p movies smoothly. For those who have or will say "your an idiot because a MacBook doesn't reach that resolution" please note that many of us (myself included) hook our MacBooks up to external displays.
Here is a link to the official Plex website: Plex
I hope this helps some people out there.
That aside, you didn't buy an October 2009 MacBook, because those don't exist. Did your MacBook Pro come with integrated graphics or does it have a dedicated video card? What size external display are you hooking up to?
MacBooks didn't exist in October 2009? I think you are mistaken sir. Moving on...
The size of the display isn't the point of this topic. Its about some 1080p videos not playing on MacBooks smoothly. The answer again for many of you out there is to use the Plex media suite.
Again this thread is referring to the base unit MacBook laptop. That's the little white one
It also seems to be mainly .MKV files that give trouble. If you can find your video in another format you might not even have to use Plex. I hope this helps some of you out there
Since this is a software issue, it really doesn't matter which hardware he has. As I said earlier, I can play 1080p content just fine on my GMA 950. The issue is solved by using software with a good decoder, such as Mplayer OSX Extended or Plex (?).
I wasn't aware they still sold the plastic hunk of junk to anyone but educational institutions. My mistake.
Yes it is. Don't come here for help and tell us we don't need information. If you're driving a 30" display at 2560x1600 with that dinky laptop, your graphical performance is going to suffer when an application makes heavy use of the GPU to display the video.
Uh huh, I got that the first time. Plex is a garbage solution anyway. That's a media center, not a playback tool.
Uh huh, I got that the first time. You corrected me, let's get going.
There we go! While MKV is an open standard and the x264 videos typically included within this container are also based on an open standard, people who produce MKV x264 videos frequently tweak the living hell out of the standard and stretch it out as far as it can go from a technical standpoint. I'm not surprised at all that that laptop is struggling playing these sorts of video back at 1080p. Of course I can't say with 100% certainty what your source for these videos are but there's one extremely large group of users that make constant use of MKV/x264 files. I know the files you're (again, most likely) talking about and they absolutely fall into this category of pushing the codec to its limit.
Listen, I know I was a dick to start off with here but you have to give us all the information you can up front. Also this really belonged in a brand new thread, and not some thread from April.
Also a great point that I completely forgot. I imagine the plastic MacBook ships with a 5400rpm drive.
You do realize that the Late 2009 Macbook has the same processor and GPU as the 13" Macbook Pro, right?
There isn't much to "tweak" in the container if you're using standard tools for working with it. The problem is likely some very immature software available for Windows to allow for DirectShow output being used by people who don't know any better.
The de facto standard for muxing into the Matroska container is mkvtoolnix. You may even be able to improve playback by remuxing troublesome videos.
(While kind of dickish,) TM was talking about x264 having lots of tweakable parameters, many of which increase decoding power needed.
x264 isn't just one thing. I would go so for as to call x264 a suite of video compression techniques with defined standard implementations. Basically, profiles like "baseline", "main", "extended", etc define which techniques will be used and to what degree when compressing the video, then it's up to the encoder to limit its self to those and decide how to go about things.
Hell, the standard defines things like "Predictive lossless coding", and 10 bit color depths, neither of which is likely supported by your playback program of choice. B-frames, for example, describe the content of the current frame in terms of the differences between the last frame and the next frame. You can see how that might require more RAM and more CPU to decode while saving disk space. x264 video can use B-frames or not. You can specify to use TONS of b-frames, which will bring even the best computers to their knees.
Actually, it is. x264 is one specific implementation of the H.264 standard ;-)
That said, I had interpreted his post to primarily be about Matroska. It sounded an awful lot like it was approaching the same territory that AVI is, and there are tons of content being put into that container because of some very ugly hacks that certainly wasn't intended by the AVI standard.
I know. Aside from profiles there are also profile levels that let you tune things further by placing constraints on the number of macroblocks and video bitrate, and the extent to which they are limited by level also depends on the profile being used. For instance, if you look at the media support for the Zune HD you'll notice that they mention the 3.1 profile level, and IIRC it allows for baseline + B-frames.
Most encoders don't support 10-bit color depth and many of the exotic chroma sub-sampling techniques, either. Then there are features like CABAC that are more strenuous on the CPU but give you a net gain of about 15% gain on the bitrate.
Even if you specify lots of B-frames it doesn't mean that the encoder will actually choose to use that many - it's simply a maximum. It's also related to how many B-frames can be used consecutively between I-frames (another setting). That said, one of the x264 devs (Dark Shikari) has said that the encoder virtually never chooses to use more than 8 B-frames over on the Doom9 forums and that setting it higher than 8 is just wasting time encoding.
I should also mention that x264 itself has a new setting for b_adapt (2) which saves even more bitrate (about another 15 or so percent) but greatly increases encoding time by being more intelligent about B-frame usage. Luckily you only need to have it enabled on the first pass since that's where the encoder decides which frame types to use, but since it is more likely to use B-frames than the default settings you might get a little more slowdown there.
Another thing that could increase CPU usage is smaller macroblock sizes, specifically of the 4x4i/p types. But odds are that it may be the B-frames depending on the hardware in question. A majority of the H.264-encoded media I watch doesn't use B-frames at all for some reason, but I'm not sure how good the hardware is in the Macbooks. Some (most?) H.264 decoders don't do multithreading (at least without introducing artifacts) so depending on what can be offloaded to the GPU (and whether the decoder in use supports GPU acceleration) it might not be able to muscle through 1080p content on one core alone.
It's really sad that most forums are plagued by people like you. You didn't read -or understand- my post (you can decide which) and then made some ignorant comment based on what you though you knew. Please stay out of this thread as it was more than fine before you added you debilitated two cents.
I await your response full of A-typical forum doucheyness
On a side note I'd like to pull this thread away from Apple bashing as people who are posting in this thread looking for help don't really care what you think of Macs in general. It's not like calling them plastic crap or the like is going to make them say "You're right. What was I thinking. I'm going to throw this out the window and go get something else." Its nonconstructive and it doesn't help the situation at hand.
Is there anyone out there who actually still has trouble with MKVs or have the suggested programs fixed your problem?