HI everyone
Just enjoying the stunning 1080p video quality that my EOS 550D camera can film at on a Panasonic vera 42 in plasma screen. I’ve been editing the videos in Final Cut (MAC) and then rendering out as Quicktime H264 at 1920 x 1080p at various fps. I’ve played them back from my MacBook pro into the TV via hdmi but the laptop struggles sometimes to play the 1080p videos fluidly unless they are well compressed.
Question is will the WD tv live help me playback really good quality 1080p material and what are the maximum fps and bit rates I could expect for fluid motion? Should I continue to render in H264 mov format and will the live play 25, 30 or 60 fps videos at full HD or just 24 fps?
Seems to be a better solution that hooking up the laptop to the tv each time and having to run it in clamshell mode to get the best video performance. Just want to copy my mov files and play them without problems!
Thanks in advance!
Simon
It’s more a question of bitrates than it is how many frames it will play.
Examine one of your problematic .mov files to see the bitrates (if they are VBR the rates will fluctuate, so try and play it at various points to see what the max is). Directly wired the Live can easily do rates up to 30mbps – wireless I’ve had problems unless the rates are below 20 (YMMV, of course). However, I’d be surprised if you had rates too high for the Live, since it can stream most blu-rays just fine.
Thanks Mike, that sounds reassuring. I’ll probably be playing the videos from an external USB HDD connected to the Live, so network speed won’t be an issue. Do you know what the max bit rate the Live can handle at 1920 x 1080p overall? Ive heard users playing uncompressed 1080p video at 60 Mbps without a glitch. Also does it only play 24 fps at 1080p?
Cheers
Simon
The specs say 1080p at 24, 1080i at 30, and 720p at 60. As I said, I’ve played videos up to 30 mbps without an issue (either directly wired to a router or a hard drive) but I can’t find any official specs on what the max rate would be. If it’s important to you I can ask someone official and find out, or you can send me a (small) sample and I can test it out for you.
At 60mbps you’re talking very large files – that’s going to be somewhere on the order of 1GB per 5 minutes – so if space becomes an issue you’ll probably want to compress your video anyway. You won’t lose anything – even at 25% compression 1080p video looks very very good indeed (almost indistinguisable from the original).
