Having trouble playing 4k video (HEVC x265) on MacBook Air 2017

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Having trouble playing 4k video (HEVC x265) on MacBook Air 2017

I am having trouble playing 4k video captured by a GoPro Hero 7 on my 2017 MacBook Air. The video is encoded with the HEVC x265 codec. Both GoPro's QUIK and QuickTime player has serious performance issues during playback. The video stutters like crazy, FPS hovers around 0 to 5 with long pauses.

I am using the latest MacOS Mojave 10.14.4.

According to Apple the only requirement to play 4k video is High Sierra.

Am I missing something, or the MBA really isn't capable of playing HEVC video?

MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Apr 2, 2019 10:21 AM

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Answer 1

andrasb20 Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 3, 2019 12:00 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for the reply!

CPU usage varies around 70% to 100% with a couple of short 100+ spikes (I've seen 130 and maybe 140 for a second). See the histogram below. It doesn't max out the 2 cores, not even remotely. Seems to me more like a buffering issue. The file is on the internal SSD.

According to wikipedia, Broadwell CPUs don't support hardware decoding of HEVC video. Fair enough, but the CPU should be powerful enough for software decoding, right? Unless decoding is a single-thread thing, in which case 1 core is maxed out.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

251,399 points

Apr 2, 2019 10:39 AM in response to andrasb20

In Activity Monitor what does CPU usage show when playing?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8522255

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/cant-play-4k-videos.2033874/

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Having trouble playing 4k video (HEVC x265) on MacBook Air 2017

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