MacBook air NOT the HD home media server we were all led to believe it was
If you were one of the 1000’s of people who rushed out and bought a new MacBook Air to use a High Def media server for your home entertainment center, we’ve got some bad news. Clocksarestupid has run some tests, and the “surprising” results are that apparently the Air doesn’t love serving up the HD. In their tests, the ultra slim laptop was able to play 720P video on its own 13-inch screen, but when connected to an external HD set, frame rates dropped quickly. And forget about 1080P, that was a washout on both the machine itself and the HDTV, often dropping as low as 11 frames a second.
Looks like for now we’ll stick to the iPod nano for all our 1080p media center goodness.
from his site “I got the new MacBook Air. Since I mainly used my MacBook Pro for web development and playing video on my HDTV, I figured it’d be an easy replacement.”
Maybe next time he’ll notice the missing “pro” from the MacBook Air name…
maybe apple figures since there is basically no hard drive space in the air, no one would ever put HD movies on it anyway. what kind of graphics card does it have? I assume embedded, but is it even up to a mini’s?
Mmwell memories are as short as the Air is light, I suppose. Or was it that long ago that the Steveness was yakking on about HD this and that for the entire Mac range?
So . . . just who lead you (all) to believe the MacBook Air was an HD home media server?!?!?! I don’t think anyone at Apple ever said it was anything more than a ultra-portable laptop. I wouldn’t use anything wireless as a server. I wouldn’t use anything that has a USB/Ethernet doggle as a server.
Sheesh! talk about unrealistic expectations!
Grant, that was a joke son!
“Pay attention, boy! I’m cuttin’ but you’re not bleedin’!”
“l keep a pitchin’ ’em, you keep a missin’ ’em!”
“Boy’s as sharp as a bowling ball.”
“You’re doing a lot of choppin’, but no chips are flyin’.”
“That boy’s so dumb, he thinks a Mexican boarder pays rent.”
-The great Foghorn Leghorn
-The Doc
If they used VLC instead of Quicktime I think they would find the performance would have been substantially better. On my 2.2ghz Macbook I also dip as low as 11fps on the 1080p Iron Man trailer while using Quicktime, but when using VLC I dropped 5 frames the whole way, and those were just at the start.
Is this right? I thought a Mini Core Solo could play HD at full-framerate? It was a single core, as slow as 1.6Ghz, with a slower integrated vampire GPU.
In order for any system to be able to run HD video at a high (or decent) performance, the system is more dependent on the video card over the processor. My old iMac G5 (isight prior) could run 1080p at [roughly] 16fps using VLC, however when I linked it up to my HDtv I came into some stumbles, turns out the best performance you’ll get as having HD play on the primary monitor only.
As for a web developer switching from a MacBook Pro to a MacBook Air….. wow…. dumb. (Notice my attempt to be nice.) 😛
what are you guys running in the background?
i have a mac mini 1.66 core duo and it runs 1080P movies (.ts rips, .mp4 files, .mkv files) without a glitch. it has a 7200RPM harddrive and i use it as my home media server..
just don’t do anything else with it while it’s playing and you’ll be fine.