Bad HD Playback

[asoksevil]

First of all I wanna say that my current 2010 MacBook Air (1,86 GHz 4 GB RAM) was the first Mac I’ve ever had and it has been performing well since then, but as everything, it has advantages and disadvantages.

One of them is the HD playback. I watch a lot of 720p movies, anime with MKV container (H264+AC3 or AAC) and I have realized that some videos can’t be played smoothly on my Air. When a video (specially Animes) have a lot of after effects edition like openings and endings, it lags a lot, and therefore, it drops several frames (my temporal fixes is seeking 10 secs before the time stamp I want it to be played). I tried ifferent players like MPlayer OSX Extended, VLC, Quick Time X, MPlayerX, Movist and the only one who handles properly the subs is MPlayer OSX Extended but it also lags hell more than MPlayer X or Movist so I was wondering if you guys have also this issue, how did you fix it or what player you use for your Anime.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

My 2007 C2D 2GHz Mac can play 1080p and 720p videos quite well, but I have never watched anime.
Maybe analyse a video via VideoSpec (I prefer that, though it hasn't been updated since 11/2009), MediaInfo Mac (10/2010) or MediaInfo (10/2010, there is a Mac OS X version to download, VideoSpec and MediaInfo Mac are using the same library as MediaInfo) and report back.

 

[Hellhammer]

What is the bitrate of those movies? Are you viewing them on MBA's screen or in an external monitor/TV? I have no issues playing 720p MKVs (~5Mb/s) on my MBA (same specs as yours) as long as the audio does not go through HDMI (that will require heavy decoding which causes frame drops. Audio via headphone jack to RCA cable works fine though).

 

[mutsaers-vr.nl]

don't export the file as "hinted" but as "streaming" (file is than also 2 times smaller), than you will be all right, even bitrates of 20 MBs work fine on the 11" even when the file is on an USB stick.