I’ve been researching hardware and software for this idea of HDTV through the mac, and thanks to a review of the Elgato EyeTV 500 by the EFF, I fired up my favorite BitTorrent client to receive a five-minute clip of Fellowship of the Rings that they recorded in HD from the WB, may it rest in peace.
There is no way this machine, a dual 500 G4 which was brand new in early 2001, has the guts to play back HDTV streams with high quality. I don’t own the EyeTV software so I didn’t try that, but EVERYONE has VLC, right? So I tried that. It’ll play, the video and audio stay synchronized, and it even looks pretty good during relatively static scenes, but throw in some action or even a quick pan, and the picture gets quite blocky.
After also trying MPlayerOSX to watch the same clip, I’m impressed by how gracefully VLC’s performance degrades: MPlayer lets both the audio and the video get choppy; it was basically un-watchable.
you can download 720p quicktime movies from Apple at the HD Quicktime site (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/). I used a bunch of these to benchmark different machines and their capability to play back HD content. What I found was that Apple’s guidelines for systems is pretty much on the mark. Granted these are using H.264 and not MPEG2 or MPEG4 but I couldn’t get more than 12fps on my dual 867Mhz G4, or the 1.67Ghz G4 laptop from work for 720p clips. 1080p was unplayable on both. The 2.0Ghz iMac however cranked 24 fps on all of the above. The one that I found worked best was http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/bbcmotiongalleryreel.html which has tons of motion and sound. I also benchmarked recompression of this clip, and a bunch of us on a macaddict forum tested different machine speeds at recompression.
So is the dual core iMac going to be fast enough to play 1080p?