Problems playing 4K h.265 files on new MacBook Pros

[eBrooker]

Hi,

There's a discussion on Mac Rumors regarding performance of the new MacBook Pros (with touch bar) when playing 4K files encoded with h.265 - they don't play (audio plays after video gets stuck on frame) - somebody suggested that VLC just hasn't been updated to play them properly yet (others argue it's a hardware/skylake/kaby lake issue).

Can someone knowledgable about the issue please comment? Will Future updates of VLC allow us to play 4K/265? Or is this really down to hardware?

Here is the thread on the MR forum: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mbp ... es.2026397

For reference, hardware used is new 2016 MBP/TB with 16GB ram, 2.9Ghz, 4GB Gpu and 512GB SSD/HD.

Thanks in advance!

[Nephele]

it's a pity that VLC GPU accelerated decoding in VLC is only working with 4K H.264 video.

[e97]

GPU acceleration for H.265 HEVC and other format would be amazing -- as a developer I'd be interested in helping out. The wiki says OS X uses Video Decode Acceleration framework (link is broken on wiki, here is the latest: https://developer.apple.com/library/pre ... index.html ) -- but it is 2 years old (2015) and only mentions h.264.

The GPUs support h.265 decoding - whats are ways to implement and access this acceleration?

[eBrooker]

Wonder if the devs have any update on this? Are we likely to see it anytime soon?

[dfuhrmann]

Currently, hardware accelerators on osx do not support h265, so people should tell complain to Apple.

4K video in h264 already plays absolutely great and fluent with hardware acceleration in the latest developement version of VLC.

[eBrooker]

Thanks dfuhrmann - I have updated my bug report with Apple asking them to provide us with an update. I'll let you know if they respond.