Watching 1080p Movies?

[Fazzl]

Is this normal? When watching a 1080p movie on my mbp, in order for it to play smoothly with no dropped frames etc, i have to close everything except for VLC. I have to close mail, itunes, i mean EVERYTHING except for VLC. Is this normal? otherwise i will get many dropped frames every 5 min or so.

 

[Firefly2002]

Is this normal? When watching a 1080p movie on my mbp, in order for it to play smoothly with no dropped frames etc, i have to close everything except for VLC. I have to close mail, itunes, i mean EVERYTHING except for VLC. Is this normal? otherwise i will get many dropped frames every 5 min or so.

There's probably a good chance it's due to hitting the hard drive rather than CPU speed. Are you low on memory? Maybe you should try restarting the computer if you haven't for a while, which clears up memory the OS has taken up and failed to release again.

 

[GreatDrok]

Is this normal? When watching a 1080p movie on my mbp, in order for it to play smoothly with no dropped frames etc, i have to close everything except for VLC. I have to close mail, itunes, i mean EVERYTHING except for VLC. Is this normal? otherwise i will get many dropped frames every 5 min or so.

Sounds about right. I ripped some HD DVDs on my MBP and VLC would barely play them. Not unexpected for a three year old machine though.

Your screen isn't even 1080p capable so why not just downsize them to 720p? I can play a 720p movie on my machine quite happily without it bogging the machine down at all and picture quality is largely the same as the 1080p due to limitations of my screen.

 

[Fazzl]

i use a cinema display 24" with it which is good for 1080p thats why

i have a 500gb WD scorpion with about 90gb free

 

[techfreak85]

1080p will take up a lot o' Juice, so its not abnormal.

when i play games, etc i always close everything. slightly for performance, mostly for OCD.

 

[NikFinn]

I was trying to run a bunch crappy avi file's in VLC and they never ran smoothly. I tried quicktime, and problem sovled.

 

[looman9635]

have you tryied quicktime with the perian plugin? that may stop the dropped frames

 

[killerrobot]

What are the specs on your mbp?

EDIT: I just saw your sig. Double check that you have the latest version of VLC.

 

[iLog.Genius]

I haven't experienced any dropped frame rates with 1080p video using Perian/VLC outputting to 46" LCD at 1920x1080. I had Windows Messenger, Safari and other small applications running and no problems. It would be understandable if it did but should it if it's on the MacBook Pro you have in your signature?

 

[Fazzl]

yeah its the one i have in my signature. i also get that beach-ball sometimes when using safari and iTunes.

 

[Fazzl]

here is screenshot of what usually happens

 

[ssdar]

- repair disc permissions
- try another mediaplayer like plex an see if this problem remains.
http://www.plexapp.com/

 

[Gen]

- try another mediaplayer like plex an see if this problem remains.
http://www.plexapp.com/

Plex plays 1080p movies like a charm on my uMBP.

 

[dr. shdw]

VLC sucks, I don't know why people worship it.

Mplayer Extended w/MT or Plex. Also run Coolbook so it doesn't down throttle.

 

[mkubal]

I've had this problem with 1080p movies that have an absurd number of reference frames. You might want to run it through MediaInfo Mac and see what it says for Ref Frames in Codec settings. I find that I have no problem with files that have 4-6 ref frames. For some reason people will encode these with like 10 ref frames which really bogs things down.

P.S. I actually have no idea what reference frames are or do. Perhaps some other MR member can enlighten us. I'd google it, but I'm too lazy.

 

[Bubba22]

Plex plays 1080p movies like a charm on my uMBP.

+1 My MBP used to drop enough frames that it got annoying in both VLC and Quicktime. Then I tried Plex and now it's extremely rare to drop a single frame even with high bitrate 1080p files.

 

[dr. shdw]

I've had this problem with 1080p movies that have an absurd number of reference frames. You might want to run it through MediaInfo Mac and see what it says for Ref Frames in Codec settings. I find that I have no problem with files that have 4-6 ref frames. For some reason people will encode these with like 10 ref frames which really bogs things down.

P.S. I actually have no idea what reference frames are or do. Perhaps some other MR member can enlighten us. I'd google it, but I'm too lazy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_frame_(video)

It's to improve compression & quality.

 

[Nautigar]

+1 for PLEX. Highly recommended.

 

[geoffreak]

VLC sucks, I don't know why people worship it.

QFT


My Mac Mini has the same processing power as your uMBP and can easily breeze through 1080p video with Plex while downloading a few torrents. Keep in mind that it was only able to do this AFTER I upgraded the HDD to a WD Scorpio Black 320GB. Prior to this, the stock 160GB HDD could only handle one torrent at a time, forget about playing 1080p video.