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Will the inclusion of HEVC/H.265 decoding in the integrated graphics be beneficial? On an older MacBook Pro I have with Intel HD Graphics 3000, the fans go bes

by rz2k 11y ago

Will the inclusion of HEVC/H.265 decoding in the integrated graphics be beneficial? On an older MacBook Pro I have with Intel HD Graphics 3000, the fans go beserk on video that my iPad handles with passive cooling without even becoming warm. I can imagine the codecs used on everything you encounter on regular sites will quickly begin to expect optimizations built into Skylake.

cmurf 11y ago
Yeah why is that? My Macbook goes nuts like a hair dryer on full when playing a youtube video, where the giant ipad with the same dimension and resolution video is all yawn.
- grrowl 11y ago
  As mentioned in the grandparent, iPads/iPhones/iPods have native hardware H.265 decoding. The iPods have have dedicated MPEG decoding hardware since the early days (one of the advantages of copying/transcoding all music via iTunes), which keeps workload down.
  - rz2k 11y ago
    I suppose there isn't much of a market in general purpose computers anymore compared to iOS devices, but is there another reason Apple wouldn't start an arms race in specialized hardware graphics chips based on what they are doing for iOS devices? By that, I mean specialized for low power video playback specifically, rather than high end graphics processing suitable for content creation and games.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > As mentioned in the grandparent, iPads/iPhones/iPods have native hardware H.265 decoding There's no h265 streaming anywhere at this stage. You meant h264?
    - sambe 11y ago
      Absence of streaming doesn't mean it's not supported in hardware. There are quite a few rumours of support in hardware from A8 onwards but nothing official from a quick Google. Several sources saying it's used in FaceTime.
- rz2k 11y ago
  I really prefer integrated graphics if they're passable, because graphics card problems are a large part of the discussions in support problems. An even older Mac Pro I had, at age three, began taking a hairdryer on the graphics card to get it to reliably boot. However, while that older MacBook Pro is just new enough to handle virtual machines pretty well, and the CPU is fine for everything I wouldn't already decide to send to a cluster somewhere, the graphics are a reason to get rid of it. I'd like to get an enormous UHD monitor to put on the wall across the room, plus models get dropped from future OS X versions almost entirely based on graphics capabilities now. I think this post misses some of the benefits of the new architecture that will eventually be realized.
- xgbi 11y ago
  I had this too, on Chrome on my MacbookAir 2012. Then I found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd... Google pushes his VP9 format so hard, it serves it to its chrome users on Mac, where it cannot be hardware-accelerated... This is ridiculous, especially when it serves H264 when browsing on Safari! I installed this app and switched to H264 for all videos, bringing in HW decoding, and since then my autonomy tripled when I go on Youtube binge.
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Theoretically, VP9 decoding could be accelerated on Macs, if Apple wanted. The Intel GPUs in Macs support it, the functionality just isn't exposed like the H.264 is. Safari is served H.264, because it does not support VP9 at all. On the other hand, VP9 streams on youtube are significantly smaller compared to similar quality H.264 streams.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Hardware vendors won't support VP9 until it has some usage, and it won't get usage until it has hardware support. VP9 has some serious space savings, so it's extremely beneficial for Google to use it when possible, and many users will appreciate faster loading video at a higher quality. Unfortunately they can't know when you'd prefer to have a more efficient decoding experience, so they rank their codecs and use the "highest" one available.
ploxiln 11y ago
If you can download the actual video file and play it outside the browser, you may be surprised how efficiently it can be played by mpv[1] or maybe vlc. 5 years ago I had a desktop computer that was 5 years old, and it plain couldn't handle std-def hulu video at the time and struggled a bit with youtube, but could play good-bitrate 720p h264 smoothly with mplayer - without hardware acceleration. I'm sure hardware acceleration helps, but it seems to partially make up for the inefficiency of the browser-context rendering. [1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
lucaspiller 11y ago
I had this issue on older Mac's, but my 2014 Macbook Air (1.4Ghz Core i5 Haswell, HD 5000) has been silent when watching 1080p YouTube and Netflix.
TD-Linux 11y ago
If you have H.265 content then yes - but no one currently uses H.265 on websites.

by rz2k 11y ago

cmurf 11y ago

Yeah why is that? My Macbook goes nuts like a hair dryer on full when playing a youtube video, where the giant ipad with the same dimension and resolution video is all yawn.

grrowl 11y ago
As mentioned in the grandparent, iPads/iPhones/iPods have native hardware H.265 decoding. The iPods have have dedicated MPEG decoding hardware since the early days (one of the advantages of copying/transcoding all music via iTunes), which keeps workload down.
- rz2k 11y ago
  I suppose there isn't much of a market in general purpose computers anymore compared to iOS devices, but is there another reason Apple wouldn't start an arms race in specialized hardware graphics chips based on what they are doing for iOS devices? By that, I mean specialized for low power video playback specifically, rather than high end graphics processing suitable for content creation and games.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > As mentioned in the grandparent, iPads/iPhones/iPods have native hardware H.265 decoding There's no h265 streaming anywhere at this stage. You meant h264?
  - sambe 11y ago
    Absence of streaming doesn't mean it's not supported in hardware. There are quite a few rumours of support in hardware from A8 onwards but nothing official from a quick Google. Several sources saying it's used in FaceTime.
rz2k 11y ago
I really prefer integrated graphics if they're passable, because graphics card problems are a large part of the discussions in support problems. An even older Mac Pro I had, at age three, began taking a hairdryer on the graphics card to get it to reliably boot. However, while that older MacBook Pro is just new enough to handle virtual machines pretty well, and the CPU is fine for everything I wouldn't already decide to send to a cluster somewhere, the graphics are a reason to get rid of it. I'd like to get an enormous UHD monitor to put on the wall across the room, plus models get dropped from future OS X versions almost entirely based on graphics capabilities now. I think this post misses some of the benefits of the new architecture that will eventually be realized.
xgbi 11y ago
I had this too, on Chrome on my MacbookAir 2012. Then I found this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd... Google pushes his VP9 format so hard, it serves it to its chrome users on Mac, where it cannot be hardware-accelerated... This is ridiculous, especially when it serves H264 when browsing on Safari! I installed this app and switched to H264 for all videos, bringing in HW decoding, and since then my autonomy tripled when I go on Youtube binge.
- vetinari 11y ago
  Theoretically, VP9 decoding could be accelerated on Macs, if Apple wanted. The Intel GPUs in Macs support it, the functionality just isn't exposed like the H.264 is. Safari is served H.264, because it does not support VP9 at all. On the other hand, VP9 streams on youtube are significantly smaller compared to similar quality H.264 streams.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Hardware vendors won't support VP9 until it has some usage, and it won't get usage until it has hardware support. VP9 has some serious space savings, so it's extremely beneficial for Google to use it when possible, and many users will appreciate faster loading video at a higher quality. Unfortunately they can't know when you'd prefer to have a more efficient decoding experience, so they rank their codecs and use the "highest" one available.

ploxiln 11y ago

If you can download the actual video file and play it outside the browser, you may be surprised how efficiently it can be played by mpv[1] or maybe vlc. 5 years ago I had a desktop computer that was 5 years old, and it plain couldn't handle std-def hulu video at the time and struggled a bit with youtube, but could play good-bitrate 720p h264 smoothly with mplayer - without hardware acceleration. I'm sure hardware acceleration helps, but it seems to partially make up for the inefficiency of the browser-context rendering. [1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv

lucaspiller 11y ago

I had this issue on older Mac's, but my 2014 Macbook Air (1.4Ghz Core i5 Haswell, HD 5000) has been silent when watching 1080p YouTube and Netflix.

TD-Linux 11y ago

If you have H.265 content then yes - but no one currently uses H.265 on websites.