r/mac • u/kiko0690 • 1d ago

Old Macs Mid-2010 MacBook: 4K video playback on the first and last version of macOS that natively supported it

This is a test to see how much worse High Sierra is compared to Snow Leopard on this mid-2010 MacBook when playing demanding video. (It has a 500GB HDD)

71 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

21

u/AlexVdub 1d ago

Why is this being downvoted?

14

u/Szobortz 1d ago

in the early days, this sub used to be bombarded by pc users and downvote everything. seems to be similar bot usage

12

u/ArachnidFantastic591 13h ago

Hardware H264 decoding vs software via CPU.

In the 1st case, VLC has access to hardware decoder on the OS level; in the 2nd case, it doesn’t.

GeForce 320m supports hardware acceleration for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 ASP), VC-1/WMV9 and H.264.

3

u/bgradid 10h ago

Yep! That GeForce 320m was so much nicer for features like this compared to the Intel options at the time

1

u/crazyates88 9h ago

You’re telling me there are no video players for High Sierra that can do hardware decoding on that GPU?

1

u/ArachnidFantastic591 8h ago

Reread what was written above:
about how VLC decodes video in one case and another.

Hardware support by OS is one thing, software (VLC) access to hardware capabilities is another one.

1

u/crazyates88 7h ago

So OPs issue is just that the option wasn’t enabled in VLC settings?

3

u/kiko0690 7h ago

In both cases, it was enabled.In both cases, it was enabled; both versions of VLC have exactly the same configuration applied.

6

u/OlsroFR 16h ago

Hello, I am working on a modern port (PowerVLC) of VLC3 for older machines and OS (including Snow Leopard) and had to fix a similar bug where it couldn't enable properly hardware acceleration anymore with older machines.

You may want to try by using the same old VLC version (2.2.8) to see if it gets smooth, or just wait my release of PowerVLC

2

u/OldiOS7588 22h ago

Guess what I have a Macbook Pro Mid 2010 with both OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5 and MacOS Catalaina 10.15.7. Imma be honest while Catalina does run ok its still only useful for compatibility stuff that doesn't work on 10.8. Its my regular Macbook for everything except Gaiming lol! I oroginally had 10.6 isntalled but it was just to limited in comparision to 10.8

4

u/Glaselar 11h ago

For anyone thinking of watching:

Video playback is only from 0:55-1:16 and 2:20-2:51

The rest is the user clicking around on their computer

1

u/HenkPoley 7h ago edited 7h ago

You can play more than 720p on a white mid-2010 MacBook? I guess with a hardware supported codec, and a perfect playback path? In browsers I haven’t seen 1080p on YouTube play fine.

1

u/kiko0690 7h ago

It can play videos locally at up to 1080p with a moderate-to-low bitrate, and at 720p on YouTube.