Battery life when playing local 1080p video from SSD

[Crowdx44]

Hi all,
So I am considering moving from Windows to a MacBook Pro 15, my question is how long does the battery last playing local 1080p video. With my Dell Xps I was getting about 7 hours of local video at 40% brightness which was more than bright enough when watching movies on transatlantic flights.
Has any used the MacBook Pro on airplane power?
Thanks for any advice.
Patrick

 

[Sanpete]

I haven't tried playing local video on battery, but the battery life of the new MBP 15 for video playing is a lot better than the Dell's according to Engadget's tests, which were done after the software fixes to improve the Dell's battery life. The Dell 15 lasted about 5-1/2 hours in their test, the MBP 15 9-11 hours.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/06/dell-xps-15-review/
https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/14/macbook-pro-review-2016/

 

[Crowdx44]

Just read the reviews, thanks for pointing those out, I agree with the numbers, the Dell XPS I had was performing pretty much the same battery life as that review. I may just go to my local Best Buy and pick up the macbook pro, even with the larger battery in the new 2017 XPS 15 it seems unlikely that it will hit the same run times as the macbook pro

 

[hawkeye_a]

I think the codec would matter. h264 and MPEG4 should be great for power consumption. Not sure about the software-hardware support for h265 and other newer codecs.

Get the MBP IMHO. I've had my 13" and am very pleased with it (screen, size/weight are great).

Cheers

 

[Crowdx44]

Well the jump for me is moving to the Mac OS, I have run it a little as a Hackintosh but never as a laptop. My main use would be light gaming (World of Warcraft and possibly Guild Wars 2) and music creation running Studio One 3 with UAD external DSP.
The battery life comes in when I fly between the US and Europe every six months or so. it is an 11 hour flight and I normally spend around 8 hours of that catching up on tv shows stored on the local hard drive. I have been pretty unlucky with in seat power although it seems whenever someone next to me is on a mac that they are able to use the in seat power lol.

 

[halfbad]

A lot will depend on the format/codec used. If your using MKV's with VLC or something like that it will be more taxing, but if your using h264 encoded video you will get a very long video viewing time, guessing 8-12 hours, since it's decoded with hardware.

 

[Crowdx44]

Most of my content is done in Handbrake and encoded as mkv's, so from what I am heading these are more power hungry?

 

[halfbad]

not necessarily, mkv is the container, the codec would make most of the difference.