My MBP is bogging down while playing x264 video

I'm trying to play a 1080p video that uses the h264 codec with a bitrate of ~16 mbit/s with a frame rate of 24 fps. Mplayer lags horribly and the audio and video are soon out of sync. Both vlc player and quicktime player run it somewhat smoothly (averaging about 18 fps) and keep the audio and video in sync. The video is also chaptered and VLC just dies at the first chapter point. With quicktime, every now and then I get a bunch of macro blocking. Is there anything else I should try? Like is there a way to tap into the 8600 gt's video acceleration in OSX?

 

I would like to know the last part as well. Is there anyway I can control the AA, AF, and like Gamma, digital color, contrast options that usually come with nvidia cards in there control panel on a windows machine?

 

Could do you provide further info about the resolution of the video?

I can play AVC/H.264 videos with out problems on the MacBook Pro CD 2.16 with our much problems.

I usaully use Intel codecs instead of Apple for HD.

 

The video is 1080p. I have no problem playing lower bit rate video such as a 1080p movie trailer off of apple's site.

 

1080p video in general is pretty processor intensive.

I remember a long time ago when I tried playing some on my old single core 2.4, it would stutter, and in VLC in the video options, there was an option that lowered the quality a bit, and made it run a lot better. (I dont remember the exact name)

I know its kinda defeating the purpose, but check the video options while the video is playing to see if you can tweak it.

Also have you tried playing back the video in bootcamp using VLC?

 

I have not tried playing it under bootcamp yet but I did try using my older windows desktop. It has an AMD 64 x2 3800+ but it stutters considerably under media player classic (using CCCP) which I find to usually perform better than VLC. I'm going to give OSXBMC a shot.

 

Well I took a little peek into Windows world with my MBP. I was attacked by about 10 pop ups, (you know the ones that close all you tabs and happily remark they will clear your computer of spyware ) while getting VLC (mind you I'm updated to SP3 and have nod32, windows firewall, and a hardware firewall) , and found that nvidia drivers left my LCD horribly uncalibrated. My findings:

VLC nearly had a heart attack, displayed a lot of artifacting while stuttering along.
MPC ran smoother but had frequent dips in frame rate where a lot of key frames were used in the encoding (such as pan shots).

Back under the safety of OSX I tried OSXBMC. It plays the video flawlessly after freezing for a few seconds as it loads the video but the UI is horrendous.

 

its a well known issue on mac - 1080p video playback is bugging. the onlt solution so far is OSXBMC.

 

I found a skin for it, now it looks just like apple tv . Although its a bit of a PITA to have to go through ~5 menus to play a file instead being able to just double click it from Finder. Finder does not recognize OSXBMC as a video player so I can't bind it to a file type.

 

I think the 1080p movie you d/led is just not encoded right.

 

Oh, well thats pretty neat that OSXBMC has good x264 playback. I'll have to give it a shot now.

Interesting that you had artifacts while playing videos in VLC on the pc side.
I had some driver issues, and had the same problems, ended up reformatting my bootcamp just to fix it.

And as to it not being encoded properly, it's probably the fact that its x264, 1080p, and high bitrate. 1080p playback is fairly intensive with those factors.

 

Is playback on VLC and MPlayer even hardware accelerated? A 8600M GT provides hardware acceleration for h.264, but I'm pretty sure the software needs to be programmed to support it seeing as PowerDVD in Windows is always getting updates that mention better support for various GPU hardware and PowerDVD seems to be what is used when sites benchmark h.264 GPU acceleration. Quicktime may have some h.264 hardware acceleration ability built-in through Core Video, but I believe this hardware acceleration business is one of the things Apple is specifically focusing on with Quicktime X in Snow Leopard.

 

can't wait for snow leopard- anyway i was going to say the same thing.

there is powerdvd and some other apps in windows that will let your 8600m gt do the work. that will solve your problems. its just that 16mbit 1080p is about the limit of your processor.