Mac HD playback
 

I was looking at some HD clips, and saw .mkv files. They seem to work not well on my mac mini. very choppy while theres no problem with .avi. Any thoughts? 720p seems to work from the apple trailers, but 1080p is choppy.

its a 1.42 G4 with 1GB ram mac mini

Most likely a combination of the slow CPU and the crappy video chip in the Mac mini.

Sadly all Mini's have really bad video chipsets. :(

oh.
Hmm, I got a dvd player with HDMI out. Says it actually plays files like divx and what they call HDAVI. Its panasonic SC-HT 855ES. I wanted to play some HD clips and see what happens on my plasma (BTW I bought a plasma out here in Poland. Got a Panasonic TH-42PV70P for about 1700USD. Just stumbled across in the store. 42" 10,000:1 contrast, 1080p, 2 hdmi, etc).
How could I do that? I could hook up my desktop (AMD fx55 with 4gb ram, 2 Gforce 7800 PCIe cards....) but really don't want to. Could I burn the .avi on 1080i onto a dvd and just play em? Would that dvd player even show a difference in picture quality between normal and the 1080i?

blank cds are cheap ... try it and see :)

Sadly HDAVI is not HD AVI files, it's a Panasonic system of controlling AV equipment over the HDMI signal lines, sort of like the Compulink system JVC has.

I can't find the specs for your Panny DVD player but most likely it will give a decent quality DIVX playback, but I don't think it'll playback Divx in 1080i. Most DVD players are certified for Divx, but most won't do higher than dvd resolutions.

As much as it'll suck, you are probably best off hooking up the PC to the Plasma, but you may run into the nasty problem of it only displaying up to XGA (1024x768).

but that in 1080p should be noticable, right?
I just tested 1080p on my laptop, and that works fine.

Very interesting
From the polish menu
Basically says "anytime the player is hooked up to HDMI and set to On, then
480p/576p/720p/1080i
Also plays DL.

BTW I havent gotten in these toys. they are being delievered tomorrow. Just wanna find out all I can now :)

I love Europe (plays all NTSC/PAL, all regions, basically anything you can put in it)
Aparently the Plasma takes in NTSC, so I need to get an xbox360 from the USA

So now if I can convert the .mkv to .avi or .mpeg 1080i, ill be a happy camper. Any way to convert 1080p to 1080i avi?

The panel takes pretty much anything, so you can do as you please. French XBOX, Russian XBOX, US XBOX, etc. Don't get too hung up on the 1080p thing. That only means the panel accepts 1920x1080/60 progressive on at least one input.

The actual native display resolution is 1024x768. The pixels aren't square, thus you don't have an elongated image. In practice it looks great, I had an NEC panel with this resolution. For 42", you really don't notice more anyway beyond a few feet.

On the DVD/Home theater system, those specs are only for UPCONVERSION of standard definition DVDs. Thus, it won't play HD DIVX, but will upconvert your SD DVDs (and perhaps DIVX) to whatever resolution. Whether you want to do this depends on whether the player upconverts better than the plasma's scaler works. They both do the same job.

You might try the Mac Mini at 1280x720 resolution to see if you can play HD content. It may choke at 1080p but play fine at 1080i/720p. The Radeon 9200 is pretty slow but may still work.

I have tried to run mkv (h264) files on my iMac G5 (2gig ram) and even using VLC its not working - the graphics chip being teh problem I think. They worked on my Dell Latitude 410 though - not sure what the mac problem is.

S

What program are you using? I can watch 720p mkvs through vlc on similar hardware. MKV is just a container, though, so some files will be more challenging than others. 1080p is never going to happen on that machine.

simongr, which version of vlc are you using? And what's the resolution of the file? Does it use any of the advanced mkv features like subtitles?

For playback Apple recommends:

Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer; 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster, At least 512MB of RAM, 128MB or greater video card

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide...endations.html

any programs to take a 1080p mkv to 720p .avi? could be windows also

I've got a mini with the exact same specs and I can play 1080p mkv's with VLC (provided nothing else is running) just fine... they have to be local to my HD, which is a faster firewire drive, by the way. I can stream 720p files just fine...

Try using VisualHub to convert them... or even VLC

Explain.
So are they on your main HDD or a removable one?

OK got my toy in today and got to play around with it.
I hooked up the mini to it and played a 720p clip. Wow!
Also I notice 1080p in .avi plays, while others .ts or .mkv don't

I want to take my HDR photos and use that video HD program that apple has and make a awsome slideshow. Whats the best way to export the images? I think the software I use allows 16bit .tif.