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Can New Mac Mini Playback 1080P QT Video?

B

BillParkinson

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 15, 2009
14
0
Greetings,

My current Mini (1.83 ghz dual) skips frames when playing back 1080P QT MOV files. Others reported the same on this forum.

I use the Mini as a DVD player / HTPC. Only recently started taking 1080P video and was bummed at skips on big screen playback.

Has anyone tried playing 1080P video on the new 2.26 ghz model? Any success or failure stories?
 
BillParkinson said:
Greetings,

My current Mini (1.83 ghz dual) skips frames when playing back 1080P QT MOV files. Others reported the same on this forum.

I use the Mini as a DVD player / HTPC. Only recently started taking 1080P video and was bummed at skips on big screen playback.

Has anyone tried playing 1080P video on the new 2.26 ghz model? Any success or failure stories?
Click to expand...

The Eye TV player plays back 1080i HD broadcast just fine in the 2.26 model. No dropped frames. I haven't tried QT playback, which was slower on my G4 mini than the Eye TV player was.
 
BillParkinson said:
Greetings,

My current Mini (1.83 ghz dual) skips frames when playing back 1080P QT MOV files. Others reported the same on this forum.

I use the Mini as a DVD player / HTPC. Only recently started taking 1080P video and was bummed at skips on big screen playback.

Has anyone tried playing 1080P video on the new 2.26 ghz model? Any success or failure stories?
Click to expand...

I've played back some 1080p trailers from Apple just fine. However, it can't playback quicktime movie wrapped mkv files at 1080p although VLC and Plex can.
 
with VLC?

Spanky Deluxe said:
I've played back some 1080p trailers from Apple just fine. However, it can't playback quicktime movie wrapped mkv files at 1080p although VLC and Plex can.
Click to expand...

I went to the apple store and downloaded about 8 1080p samples in h264 mkv.

Unfortunately (at least on the samples i tried). Quicktime+perian, and VLC were unable to play the files without dropped frames and some were just un-viewable due to the huge amount of artifacts. Or just un-viewable :).

Plex everything just fine. However the cpu utilization ranged from 90-150, averaging at about 120.

Thats on the 2.0Ghz model with 2GB ram.

So everything plays fine on your 2.26?
 
Follow Up

Firstly, Thanks for all the replies!

So part of what I am hearing here is that Plex, VLC, and eyeTV have their own 264 codecs which are not the same a Apples QT codec and therefore might have better efficiency and throughput? (eg less dropped frames?)

Kaks, Apple store folk must love you. I brought in a USB flash with sample MOV files to test on a new Mini and as not allowed to plug it into copy the test files... (Apple, of course lost themselves a potential sale!)

I will try a few of these alternate players on the 1.83 first and see what results I get.
 
The Geforce 9400 GPU has VLD (bittsream) decoding for MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264.

The new Macbooks based on the geforce 9400 M can playback HD MOV files with quicktime with minimal CPU utilisation.

I'm fairly sure the new Mac mini and the iMacs based on the 9400 can do the same.
 
Sharangad said:
The Geforce 9400 GPU has VLD (bittsream) decoding for MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264.

The new Macbooks based on the geforce 9400 M can playback HD MOV files with quicktime with minimal CPU utilisation.

I'm fairly sure the new Mac mini and the iMacs based on the 9400 can do the same.
Click to expand...

Yes they can, however, only for quicktime encoded h264 files. I tried opening an mkv up in Quicktime with the Perian plugin (h264 encoded file) and it didn't use the acceleration. Nor did it when I saved it as a quicktime file (hardly surprising since it just wraps the mkv with a mov handler for easier use). I checked this using the activity monitor.
 
Tried VLC

I popped VLC on my current 1.83 Mini.

It could not play back the 1080P files at all. It would either freeze or skip a whole lot of frames...

The files are taken with a Canon 5D mkII.
 
BillParkinson said:
I brought in a USB flash with sample MOV files to test on a new Mini and as not allowed to plug it into copy the test files... (Apple, of course lost themselves a potential sale!)
Click to expand...

That's kinda stupid that they lost a sale because you wanted to plug in your rogue USB stick into one of their computers. If you owned a computer/technology store, would you let random customers come in and plug any old thing they wanted into your devices? Probably not, and I know I wouldn't.

In no way am I saying your intent was malicious, but you never know with many people these days what their intent is, plus apple doesn't want people trying to steal IP from their computers that are on display.
 
BillParkinson said:
I popped VLC on my current 1.83 Mini.

It could not play back the 1080P files at all. It would either freeze or skip a whole lot of frames...

The files are taken with a Canon 5D mkII.
Click to expand...

are you serious? my old mini with a GMA950 can play back 1080p files fine. granted i get about 80-135% processor usage.

but that's fine, i've watched 3 hour long movies, and movies back to back without any overheating problems
 
JustGretchen,

That brings me a lot closer to resolving the 1080P playback issue. Thanks for your contribution.
 
Plex was close!

I just reviewed this thread and realized I had NOT yet tried Plex.

I downloaded it took 15 minutes to realize it did not work by mouse...

Then tried playing back my video.

Plex was very close to proper playback of my 1080P 30FPS high bit rate video.

But still did skip a few frames.

I am thinking a little boost in CPU power might get Plex over the hump....
 
Snow Leopard & QT X

Seem to be able to do this on the same hardware.

Need more testing to give it a full thumbs up
 
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