Shouldn't my Mac play this video ?

[Sovon Halder]

Jellyfish 140mbps 4K UHD h264

My 2017 MacBook Pro 13" TB (base stock configuration) can't play this smoothly in VLC. The first 15 seconds are choppy and then it becomes smooth but the VLC CPU usage is 300+%.

Hardware support for h264 should be good enough already. Is the bitrate too high here (Blu rays have 128mbps max?) or am I understanding this wrong?

Can any other MBP owner give some info, please ?

Thank you.

EDIT: I recorded the playback in this video. [6MB]

 

[EugW]

Maximum bitrate for for regular 1080p Blu-ray is actually 40 Mbps for the video.

That jellyfish video seems to have some other issues too, since I actually re-encoded the HEVC video to h.264 and still got stuttering in the same spots.

Plus I'm not sure how well vlc deals with 4K h.264.

 

[Sovon Halder]

Thank you for your reply.

I don't know much about video editing or encoding/decoding. I have some queries.

1. When I said 128mbps I meant, 128mbps for UHD blurays. (It says so in the jellyfish test video website.) So I thought the bitrate might be higher than normal, causing it to stutter. Don't know how much of a valid reason that is. Besides now that you mentioned, the jellyfish might have some other issues, I'll leave this concern. If you know, can you link me to some quality 4K h264 encode? I want to see how my MacBook Pro handles 4K h264 before high Sierra comes around.

2. I assume all intel graphics chips include h264 hardware acceleration now. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If so, then how come a h264 encode (in this case jellyfish h264) use that much of CPU? Shouldn't it use somewhere around 10-20% CPU instead of 300%?

3. In terms of resource usage, how much of a difference does it make if - lets say - I'm decoding(playing) a h264 encoded 1080p vs 4K? I read the other threads where you said Quicktime would use less than 10% for a 4K HEVC with native hardware acceleration, IIRC. Doesn't the same apply for h264 also. This is my resource usage for a 4GB 1080p web.dl in VLC. I expected it to be way less than this.


4. I'm a movie buff. All I do for entertainment is Youtube and HD movies. I'm very new to Mac. If you can recommend a good setup(player) that I should try, that would be very helpful.

Thank you.


P.S. I am not going to go hard on UHD all the time and I'd still watch full hd movies most of the time - because I don't have the resources to manage bandwidth/store data/stream content as of now. I might in future. I'm a bit OCD(in a good way ) and I want to make sure I'm good to go with my current decision.

 

[Codpeace]

This is interesting and you've asked good questions that I'm curious about, too. Thanks for posting!