60p/h.265 video playback issues on my mini

[AVR2]

My early 2009 mini (2 GHz, 8GB) can't handle playback of 1080p60/720p60 video on YouTube. It also can't cope with 1080p h.265 video.

I guess that's just a limitation of the hardware and there's nothing I can do about it short of buying a newer mini?

 

[jpietrzak8]

My early 2009 mini (2 GHz, 8GB) can't handle playback of 1080p60/720p60 video on YouTube. It also can't cope with 1080p h.265 video.

I guess that's just a limitation of the hardware and there's nothing I can do about it short of buying a newer mini?

Well, yes; video codecs keep changing rapidly. The H.265 codec only appeared in 2013, so hardware created in 2009 is not likely to support it. The 2009 Minis have a 3rd gen Nvidia Pureview HD processor, so they can process a wide range of video formats, but only those that existed at the time it was designed...

If you absolutely must view videos encoded in a format the hardware doesn't understand, you can still use a video transcoder (such as Handbrake) to convert them into a format the machine does recognize.

 

[AVR2]

In fairness, I'm able to play h.265 on a 2008 Mac Pro, so it's not as if computers are only able to handle video codecs that existed when the hardware was designed. It's all about the inherent processing power of the hardware, right? With software to provide the necessary playback decoding, any hardware can play any video, as long as it's got enough grunt.

Clearly the 2009 mini doesn't have the grunt to handle such a processor-intensive codec as h.265 (I get an image, but not smooth motion), and it struggles with 60p video on YouTube, but some older Mac hardware that was higher-end to start with *can* handle it.

 

[jpietrzak8]

In fairness, I'm able to play h.265 on a 2008 Mac Pro, so it's not as if computers are only able to handle video codecs that existed when the hardware was designed. It's all about the inherent processing power of the hardware, right? With software to provide the necessary playback decoding, any hardware can play any video, as long as it's got enough grunt.

Well, yes. There is software (such as VLC) which can decode video entirely without hardware support. But yeah, whether it can manage that playback well will depend on the power of the CPU. (And, I suppose, on how complex the compression itself is; some videos, and some compression settings, are more computationally intensive than others. You might find that some less-heavily-compressed h.265 video will be playable by VLC even on your Mini...)