[drnkn_stylz]

Looking for some other peoples experiences with battery life on their MacBook or MacBook Pro when using the 9400m and watching 1080p video.

I'm using a 13" MacBook Pro (2.53gHz). Last night I watched a 2 hour long movie that was a 1080p .mkv container. My battery was at 99% full, WiFi and Bluetooth turned off, screen brightness at about 65%. At the end of the movie I had 10% of my battery left.

I'm sure 1080p video will drain my battery faster than 720p video. I have to do more testing, but I don't recall other 1080p .mkv videos draining my battery as much. Could this be related to the format of the video within the .mkv container? Anyone else have some experience with battery consumption and 1080p video?

[mduell]

What'd you play it in?

Could be the video is High Profile H.264, which cause Perian to kick in if you have it installed instead of QuickTime's native decoder.

[drnkn_stylz]

I was using VLC 64bit (1.0.5 I believe).

I'll have to check what kind of video is within this specific movie and compare it with others. Battery condition is normal according to OPT+Click on the battery menu.

[mduell]

2 hours of 1080HD playback in VLC sounds pretty normal. I suspect you could do better in QuickTime with the GPU offloading, but you'd have to remux the video into an MP4 container first.

[Rumor]

Can a 13" MBP do 1080p? Max resolution is 1280 x 800 which would make 1080p unavailable, no? (On the MBP screen that is)

[macaddict0001]

You can still watch it, just not actual size.

[drnkn_stylz]

Originally Posted by macaddict0001 

You can still watch it, just not actual size.

In this case I used my build in screen, but I also have a 46" 1080p LCD TV I use as well.

[macaddict0001]

My last laptop was an ibook g4 800 so I don't know how relevant my experiences are, but if I was say, using a word processor with wifi off and brightness down I could get more than 5 hours of battery life, web browsing was less, especially with flash. And If I was playing a 3d game, just under 2 hours. I could play a DVD for about 2.5-3 hours. Of course all that was when the battery was more or less new.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Rumor 

Can a 13" MBP do 1080p? Max resolution is 1280 x 800 which would make 1080p unavailable, no? (On the MBP screen that is)

Absolutely; it decodes the whole picture and then downsizes it.

[drnkn_stylz]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Absolutely; it decodes the whole picture and then downsizes it.

Upon further inspection, the video was x264.

[mduell]

x264 is an encoder for H.264 video. It doesn't tell us anything about the video's profile.