[rajsharma714]

Hello,

I'm thinking about getting the new 15" Macbook Pro (2.53Ghz i5) which has NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB of RAM.

I currently have a giant movie collection that is using the MPEG-2 codec with the MKV container at 1080p on my PC (2.66Ghz i5 Lynnfield, 8GB RAM, ATI 5770 GPU). Everything runs fine on my desktop since it has pretty good hardware to support the playback.

I was wondering if the new Macbook with the specs above would be good for playback for the type of MKVs I have? Or would it be advisable to suck it up and encode the movies from MPEG-2 to H.264 for better playback on the Macbook Pro.

Thanks.

[davilla]

Hello,

I'm thinking about getting the new 15" Macbook Pro (2.53Ghz i5) which has NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256MB of RAM.

I currently have a giant movie collection that is using the MPEG-2 codec with the MKV container at 1080p on my PC (2.66Ghz i5 Lynnfield, 8GB RAM, ATI 5770 GPU). Everything runs fine on my desktop since it has pretty good hardware to support the playback.

I was wondering if the new Macbook with the specs above would be good for playback for the type of MKVs I have? Or would it be advisable to suck it up and encode the movies from MPEG-2 to H.264 for better playback on the Macbook Pro.

Thanks.

It will be fine, MPEG-2 takes less CPU for decoding than H.264

[rajsharma714]

It will be fine, MPEG-2 takes less CPU for decoding than H.264

Thanks for the information and the quick reply.

[krasn]

Glad that I came across this thread on Google — it’s so hard to find a straight answer for this question.

My cousin is contemplating on getting the base 15" i7 model, which uses the NVIDIA GT 330M with 512MB memory.

Will it be able to play back 1080p videos encoded in H.264 and/or VC–1?

TIA!


(PS. I know, for a fact, that 1080p video in H.264 struggles to play back with the 9600M — hence the question.)

[rajsharma714]

Glad that I came across this thread on Google — it’s so hard to find a straight answer for this question.

My cousin is contemplating on getting the base 15" i7 model, which uses the NVIDIA GT 330M with 512MB memory.

Will it be able to play back 1080p videos encoded in H.264 and/or VC–1?

TIA!


(PS. I know, for a fact, that 1080p video in H.264 struggles to play back with the 9600M — hence the question.)

It will run fine. THe i7 CPU is plenty of power and the GPU is pretty good as well. H.264, like said above, does use more CPU usage, but since the i7 is fantastic and the GPU is a pretty good, you should be fine. Besides H.264 is GPU accelerated (I think), so that should help as well.

[krasn]

It will run fine. THe i7 CPU is plenty of power and the GPU is pretty good as well. H.264, like said above, does use more CPU usage, but since the i7 is fantastic and the GPU is a pretty good, you should be fine. Besides H.264 is GPU accelerated (I think), so that should help as well.

Ok, that’s great — just that I have a bit of phobia about this.

Thanks very much for the info!