I am looking for feedback on how to achieve the best playback of 24 fps 10-bit color, 4k HDR video in HEVC format on the XDR Pro Display.
I'm interested in suggestions for system settings and playback tools to get the most fluid playback and most accurate color reproduction.
I'm not a video pro, so my apologies up front if this contains much video noobery.
My setup with the XDR Pro Display is a 2018 Mac Mini 3.2 6-core i7 with 64gb RAM and the Blackmagic RX 580 eGPU in macOS Monterey.
I've tried playback in VLC and
mpv.
mpv seems to be more configurable and provide better performance than VLC. I installed that with brew and have discarded VLC for now.
Apart from color, my biggest concern is dropping frames.
In System Preferences -> Displays, if use scaled display and choose "looks like" 1504x846 or 1920x1080 mvp seems to not drop any frames. (You can view video playback stats by hitting the 'i' key)
However, in the default, looks like 2560x1440 or scaled "More space" looks like 3008x1692, mpv starts dropping frames in
output but not
decode. Not a lot but a every few seconds it is dropping one. In high motion scenes maybe every second.
If I understand it correctly, HEVC decode must be done by the CPU. This has something to do with Mojave's introduction of Metal which prevents normal use of AMD Polaris GPUs from doing HEVC decoding.
Thus, there is no normal way to make macOS decode H.265 using the AMD card without some OpenCore
hackery, also mentioned
here.
Some questions I've had:
- If the video is at 3840x1604. What should I have the display resolution set to? Default or a scaled setting?
- Should Night shift and True Tone be disabled to ensure they don't affect color repro?
- The Apple support page on Playing HDR video on macOS (updated two days ago):
HDR content might play at resolutions no greater than 1080p on Intel-based Mac mini, Intel-based MacBook Pro, and Intel-based MacBook Air models, depending on the HDR content and the display on which it is viewed.
Does Apple mean the video won't play at all, or that it won't playback at full frame rate?
- That same page shows a screenshot where HDR can be enabled and disabled. This setting is not available on the XDR, because HDR is enabled by default, correct?
- If mpv is reporting dropped frames at output, is this the same thing as render described in this issue in the mpv repo?
- The above issue describes use the --macos-force-dedicated-gpu option, is it correct to expect this to offload more processing to the eGPU and result in less CPU fan during playback of this media?
- Is anyone running OpenCore purely to achieve AMD GPU HEVC decode? What's that like?
Any feedback on this is appreciated.