The point of HEVC being to reduce bandwidth, not to inflate it to extreme cases that do not exist outside the studio…
No, my old hardware cannot play this sample properly. It is the equivalent of a whopping 70 GB movie. The ones I watch are 4K 10-bit HEVC at 2–3 GB, to be compared to 10–15 GB for H.264. That is the typical usage, and it works just fine on even old equipment without native hardware decoding.
I can guarantee that nobody can see or hear any difference.
Errr... Normal UHD Blu-ray discs are spec'd to reach up to 108 Mbps. While 76 Mbps is high, its not really that high, and its quite normal for a 24 fps movie to be say 40 Mbps or 35 GB. However, the bitrate might be larger for 60 fps sequences, like this demo file.
And these files play just fine on my fanless 12" MacBook in QuickTime, due to hardware acceleration. That's the whole point of hardware acceleration after all. Judging by my results, I get the impression that vlc isn't using hardware acceleration on the Mac, which IMO is a big problem for 4K HDR HEVC.
And as mentioned, the same file plays just fine on my iPhone 7 Plus, even in vlc, again because of hardware acceleration. So again, it seems the improvements in vlc have been leaps and bounds on iOS, but not so much on macOS, in terms of true HEVC playability.
BTW, my iPhone records video in 4K HEVC 8-bit at 20-25 Mbps. My kid's last kindergarten recital video was a 4 minute and 10 second video that was 722.5 MB. That means a data rate of 2.89 MB per second, or almost 16 GB for a 90 minute movie. And that's for 8-bit and 30 fps.
Luckily though, because it's relatively low complexity, and 8-bit 30 fps, most recent machines can decode it in software. But using hardware means the fans will never ramp up, and the machine stays quiet when playing the video back.
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Very interesting. Well, I guess your issues don't compare to what I'm doing, as I'm still on 1080p and 1440p monitors. Lame, huh? haha...
Once I'm more settled in, I'll pull the trigger on a 32" 4K monitor. Got any advice as to which one? I really dig my BenQ 1440p monitor. For one, I love that it has NO camera! At any rate, I'd like to stay at or below $1000.
As for VLC vs. IINA vs. others, for the purposes of 1080p playback and some editing, where would you rate the players with these criteria?
Thanks for the in-depth responses!
Well, put it this way: Back in the old days I used to say I wouldn't be satisfied until Apple TV supported 1080p h.264 decoding in hardware, even though the units could only output a maximum of 720p. Why? Because the standard for h.264 was 1080p. The files existed and if I had one, I wanted to be able to play it, even if it was only at 720p. I didn't want to have to re-encode my files to lower bitrates and at 720p just to be able to watch them. The key is to be able to get the file once at a decent resolution and bitrate and then play it on anything.
I wanted the same for my iPhones, but people said was crazy to expect that. Fast forward just a few years and 1080p h.264 has become normal, even at high bitrates, and even on cheap Android phones.
Now with HEVC, I would expect the same, but this time with 10-bit 4K material. And I already have support for this on my iPhone.
