HDTV .TS Playback on iBook

[MonteCristo]

Hey guys, I tried recently playing some hdtv transport stream files on my iBook and they didn't quite play smoothly. I have the 933 G4 with 256 Ram, 9200 radeon. I have a 720p ESPN clip I tried and surpurisingly that did play fine, but I think the 1080i content is just a little too much for it. When you first open a file its too big, so you just resize the window and then it plays better. I'm wanted to find out if anybody else has tried this also. I'm wondering if I stick a 512 stick in it and get the laptop up to 640MB if it will play any better. Does VLC use the video card to help decode files? Thanks for any input.

[Sigmund]

Not to be rough, but I don't think there is anything you can do to play such a clip smoothly with that cpu.

[The DJ]

1080i HDTV is really high quality. You shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't play. Only 1.5Ghz and up usually plays it pretty well.

[MonteCristo]

Yea I was just being optimistic that maybe there is something I could do.

[The DJ]

buy a new mac and give me your old one

[MonteCristo]

Lol, I just bought this iBook last week. Not a chance, .

[Brtzt]

Where Can I find this .ts files in HD??? I´m curious to try HD on a Mac.
So, would it be possible with a DP 1,3 Mhz G4?

[Sigmund]

I think there are some urls in another thread here somewhere. I think your maching perhaps will manage "viewable" but not perfect results. Don't know though these things are hard to predict

[CosmicAlien]

The problem is that VLC does not use any hardware acceleration on a Mac. Without it you cant play HDTV smoothly on anything. Havent tried a dual G5, but my 1.25Ghz PowerBook G4 cant do HDTV.

Its possible on Win machines with players which support the graphics hardware. A Radeon 9600 and 1-1.5Ghz is more than enough.

Will there ever be hardware support of at least some Mac graphics cards with VLC ?

Or how can I play HDTV smoothly on a Mac (with less than 3Ghz )

[The DJ]

On OSX there is no such thing as hardware support.
OSX forces you to use software decoding for everything.
The new version should be quite a lot faster for these kind of thins, since I enabled Altivec for a lot of new Macs, and there have been some some Altivec optimalizations.

[CosmicAlien]

Thank you for the fast reply !

Sad thing, that means I cannot use my Mac for smooth HDTV playback. I am trying to collect some HD stuff, since the quality is amazing and I run it on a projector. Connecting my PB via DVI to my LCD Projector would be a dream with smooth HD playback.

VLC is a great tool and extremely versatile, but for HD I then will have to use a Win machine.


For a software player, VLC is indeed performing very well !


On a 1.25Ghz PB G4 I get around 14-16fps with 1920x1080 mpeg2 movies and VLC0.7.0 on 10.3.2

QuickTime player is not faster, maybe a bit slower and has probs with multiple audio streams. It also cannot deinterlace. So its of no use for me here.

Thanks for programming VLC on the Mac, I use it nearly daily !

[Brtzt]

I´ll try it, but where are files to try them!!

[CosmicAlien]

You can find legal HD samples at

http://206.159.116.24/public.htm

weekly new short samples from US HD Television from movies or TV shows

or bigger ones

ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/

Nasa shots of the Space Shuttle launches !!

Resolutions are i.e. 1280x720 and 1920x1080

Have fun, but beware that these HD filers are really big (150MB to 1gig)
VLC plays them all, depending on your hardware.