Mac Mini (2011) HD playback issues

[giacoool]

Hi!

I have some issues playing my HD movies on my Mini (i5, 4gb RAM). They are not running very smoothly.. A bit of stutter, very annoying..

I've tried with Plex, VLC and mplayer. I've tried different HDMI cables and playing from both local and external harddrives. I even close all running programs. But it's all the same.. Shouldn't the mini be able to play 1080p and 720p without any problems?

At the moment I'm playing my HD movies directly from my Samsung '40 connecting an external harddrive, as the mini can't do the job

 

[simsaladimbamba]

That is strange, as even my 2007 iMac can play back H.264 encoded 1080p footage (not all though).
In order to find out, what may be wrong with your videos, you can use the following three applications to analyse a sample video file.

• VideoSpec (free)
• MediaInfo (free)
• Media Inspector (2.99 USD € in the Mac App Store (MAS))

When done, you can use the "Report" (VideoSpec) and "Export" (Media Inspector) button to export a report,
attachable to your next post via the

button.
In MediaInfo you have to go to the Menu Bar, select View > Text and copy the text via CMD+A > CMD+C and paste it via CMD+V into your next post.​

 

[Westyfield2]

That should be able to do anything fine, even if somehow you'd turned hardware acceleration off.

Just to check, the content you're playing is stored on a fast enough source (i.e. your internal HDD rather than being streamed via WiFI.)

 

[paulrbeers]

Hi!

I have some issues playing my HD movies on my Mini (i5, 4gb RAM). They are not running very smoothly.. A bit of stutter, very annoying..

I've tried with Plex, VLC and mplayer. I've tried different HDMI cables and playing from both local and external harddrives. I even close all running programs. But it's all the same.. Shouldn't the mini be able to play 1080p and 720p without any problems?

At the moment I'm playing my HD movies directly from my Samsung '40 connecting an external harddrive, as the mini can't do the job

I'm not even having a problem with my base 2.3ghz Mini doing these things (with 8GB of RAM of course). Something is certainly not right....

 

[giacoool]

I'm not streaming anything. The content is stored on my local HDD and an external HDD (WD My Book Essential 3TB).

But I will analyze a sample video as mentioned above and post the reports..

 

[Supra Mac]

Here are a couple things you can do.

I have a Sony XBR TV with the issue of a stutter every couple of seconds. Here are the things I checked to fix it. I have the 2011 Mini with GPU, I'm running PLEX.

Display settings:

What are your options on freq.? Mine has two, only runs smooth on 60hz vs 24hz. This is on a unprocessed signal, more on this later.

You should not have to adjust under scan, if so then check your screen settings, for the Sony I had to set my to full pixel, its like a PC mode I guess.

TV signal processing:

Sony has something call Cinemotion that processes the signal to "improve" smoothness. Maybe the Sammy has something similar. In my case, it made it stutter, so I turned this option off as it was setting to process the signal on default. Check your settings so the TV leaves the signal original.

Hope this fixes your problem, if not you may want to test on another HD TV if possible.

 

[giacoool]

I have various freq settings between 60 and 24. How do i determine wich freq to use? It's currently set to 60hz. But none of them fitted to my screen. Then I adjusted the screen to fit in the OS X display settings. That messed up my 3D movies though.. But after messing around in my TV settings i figured out how to fit the screen without adjusting the OS X display settings.

I also discovered something else in my TV settings. There was some kind of 'Gaming' option wich improves the speed but slightly reduces the quality. I turned that on, and now my movies don't stutter..

Apparently I have to reduce the quality in my TV in order to play my movies without stutter.. How lame is that? But the weird thing is, that my movies don't stutter when playing from a HDD connected directly to the TV without reducing the quality..

The Mac Mini and my Samsung TV is not getting along..?! I have a 40 LED UE40D6517.. And how do I figure out to buy a proper TV next time.. If don't want these issues...?

 

[giacoool]

I solved the problem. Apparently it's some kind of fps problem between the mini and my TV. Also known as 24p stutter.

In XBMC settings -> video -> playback i turned on "Sync playback to display" and "Adjust display refresh rate to match video"

Now my HD movies play perfectly!