Mac OSX choppy MKV playing help

[gebthec]

hi, i tried everything i came across to play MKV files smoothly. Players I tried: Quicktime with Perian, MPlayer and VLC. I changed the preferences on VLC to skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding (All).
Still no luck with a 1080p.BluRay.x264.mkv, incredibly choppy
Any ideas?

Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel core i5 - 4GB memory

[jman98]

Welcome. You should have posted this in our Mac forums as while it seems like a software issue, it's really a Mac issue, but hopefully others will see it and help. Most of our readership doesn't use Macs which is why anything that is really a Mac issue needs to go there to be sure it will be seen people with Mac experience. Don't post another post in that Forum as we don't like posts across multiple forum areas. Wait a few days and if you don't get any more replies other than mine, try making a new post in the Mac forum here.

I have an iMac on loan from work and it originally ran Leopard. When I first got it, I couldn't play ANY 1080 video, not even Divx or MPEG-2. Divx and MPEG-2 take up a lot less CPU processing power than H.264 so it should have worked fine on the iMac. I researched it and here's what I found out. I have no idea if this is still true or not, but it definitely was true for Leopard. Basically the screen was just a little bit bigger than 1920x1080 on all Macs, so OS X had this "bug" (in quotes because Apple was aware of the issue and refused to consider it a bug or to fix it, at least at the time) where whatever your player was, the OS got involved in what you were doing and tried to resize the video down from the total screen size to 1920x1080 and that's why it can't play the video smoothly. I have no idea if this issue persists into Snow Leopard or Lion, but it could be your problem. I don't really keep up to date on Macs and I have a much better PC now at home so I don't use my iMac for video watching. I honestly don't know if the issue is still around or not but it sounds like it may still be around on your Macbook. What OS X version do you have?

[Baldrick]

Does 720p or lower h264 video work fine?

I'm moving you to our mac section.

[terryj]

You'll need to either:
1. Dumb it down to 720p, either by using VisualHub to make it an XVID avi or an MP4
or
2. Switch to a media center box that can handle 1080, like the WDTV Live Plus,
which is what I did.

The only video I watch on a mac is video I create. If I want to watch 1080 video,
I do it on my 42" Samsung via WDTV Live Plus box. Handles it with ease...

[gebthec]

thanks for the replies. i also get choppy playing at 720p so i guess I will have to look into an external media player..

[gebthec]

sorry I forgot to answer: my Macbook's OS is Snow Leopard and the current video playing screen resolution is 1440 x 900

[jman98]

thanks for the replies. i also get choppy playing at 720p so i guess I will have to look into an external media player..

That is really odd because I have always been able to watch 720p video on my iMac without problems. I just did a test to confirm it.

[rumplestiltskin]

Use Handbrake or MP4Tools (formerly MKVTools) to convert the file to H264/MP4. I do that with all MKVs as even my WDTV player chokes on them.

[pixel zombie]

on my mac mini with only 2gb of ram i have to use VLC and watch it at half size in order for the video to play properly...