Just bought a Macbook 1.83 last week and upped it to 2 gigs of OCZ RAM and a 120 gig 5400rpm HDD. Spectacular deal and I absolutely love the machine. I was hoping that it would be able to handle H.264-encoded 1080p video, but it drops frames, even though the machine never seems to exceed 80% usage from either core and both stay under 80 degrees the whole time (from viewing CoreDuoTemp while watching a 1080p video).
Most 1080p H.264 vids seem to get about 15-24 fps. A quick check of Apple's quicktime site shows that 720p H.264 requires a 1.83 Ghz Core Duo, while the 1080p requires 2.0 Ghz Core Duo. Does the .17 Ghz jump really make that big of a difference towards decoding video, or does this have more to do with the quicktime H.264 decoder still being fairly early and poorly optimized for Intel dual core macs??
I'm starting to rethink the $200 I saved by downgrading to the entry level Macbook. I thought I had gotten a great deal by going for the lower one and buying an external dual layer DVD burner for $70, but that was assuming the processor difference to be negligible. For those of you with 2.0 Macbooks, do your machines ever drop below 24 frames in the 1080p H.264 vids on Apple's website? FYI, I was viewing the Warren Miller Higher Ground & BBC Motion Gallery trailers.
Intuitively, I had guessed that a 10% difference in clock speed (which from most benchmarks seem to result in a 4-8% bump in real speed under load) would not be the difference in decoding 1080p videos since 1080p vids are only 50% bigger in file size yet 3x larger in pixel count than 720p.
On a semi-related note, can 1.66 Core Duos in the Mac Minis handle 720p H.264?
Top
