[falc410]

My father recently bought himself a GoPro Hero3+. Currently he uses a Mac Mini with XBMC to watch all his videos. We record our videos at 1080p and tried different FPS settings. But the Mac Mini is unable to play more than 30fps so I brought my MBPr which should have been able to play those videos, but again I can not get more than 40fps.

That's quite weird since the machine should have enough power. Even my five year old PC with Intel C2D has no problems running those movies. Is it due to the discrete graphics card (got a 2 year old ATI Radeon in there, powerful enough for most of the recent games like Borderlands 2).

Or is it an OSX issue?

I have a short sample file here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/68xeiy84wyxk4v8/GOPR0249.MP4

EDIT / Update:

This is an OSX issue! I got a old Macbook Pro here, should have about the same specs as the Mac Mini but running Windows 7 - here XBMC 12.3 runs the GoPro movies at 50fps just fine! Updated the OSX installation from 12.2 to 12.3 but video performance is the same. That explains though why even the MBPr was not able to run the movies.

[Ned Scott]

Try turning hardware video decoding off: XBMC -> Settings -> Videos -> Playback -> Allow hardware acceleration

[falc410]

I did, didn't change a thing. CPU usage is the same and still can't get more than 40fps.

Btw my MBPr runs 10.9.1 (latest I think) while the Mac Mini is still on 10.7.x. Both run XBMC 12.3. And the Macbook has Windows 7 x64 installed via Bootcamp, runs just fine.

[Ned Scott]

I think this is related to the app nap issues we've been having with OS X 10.9.