iPad is a bit choppy on parts of 1080p video...halp
March 13, 2023 6:52 AM Subscribe
my (admittedly not very new) iPad sometimes gets a bit choppy, and I was curious if anyone else has had this issue (google says yes, even with newer ones) and what the resolution is (said googling was inconclusive)
for more technical whatever, the video that was choppy today was mkv with the following encoding information: H264 Hi10P 1080p (it was a blu-ray rip, if it matters). I've noticed this happens in parts of shows that have a lot of complex particle effects, that sort of thing (my uneducated guess as a programmer is that perhaps the way these are compressed is such that such effects create a large spike in CPU/memory load or something)
there are a number of things that could help, and I will play around, but I figured I would ask before I spend a bunch of (tedious!!) time testing this factor, then that factor, then that factor...like I said, googling revealed that it seems to be an issue, but no conclusive answers
as I see it, some possibilities are...(though I welcome mentioning others!)
- perhaps my iPad is simply too old. at this point it is maybe 6-7 years old? though it generally works fine on 1080p video, just chokes when the video gets particularly "heavy" in effects. some people said with newer iPads they still had this issue, but hard to know when those comments were from
- do media players matter for this sort of thing? I'm using VLC on ipad though I could happily change to something else, I'm not using any power user features. I would assume that decoding is sort of a commodity thing at this point, but who knows
- perhaps encoding matters? I doubt mkv should matter as such as it's just a container, but perhaps there are encodings that are more "iPad friendly"? I am decently familiar with ffmpeg at this point (eg pretty good at finding what I need on stack overflow) so if some sort of re-encoding could "optimize" it for the iPad that would work, though I'm not sure how much of a hit in quality that will be (what little I know of the ripping community seems like they obsess quite a bit over these details, but I have no clue if it matters or not?)
- I suppose I could try to get 720p instead of 1080p, as you can't really see the difference on an iPad. I'd rather not if I could avoid it, because sometimes I watch things on my computer/TV (where you can see the difference), and sometimes on my iPad, so it's nice to just have one file and not have to juggle different files...but if this is the only option, that's all ther eis to it.
-??? your suggestion here
for more technical whatever, the video that was choppy today was mkv with the following encoding information: H264 Hi10P 1080p (it was a blu-ray rip, if it matters). I've noticed this happens in parts of shows that have a lot of complex particle effects, that sort of thing (my uneducated guess as a programmer is that perhaps the way these are compressed is such that such effects create a large spike in CPU/memory load or something)
there are a number of things that could help, and I will play around, but I figured I would ask before I spend a bunch of (tedious!!) time testing this factor, then that factor, then that factor...like I said, googling revealed that it seems to be an issue, but no conclusive answers
as I see it, some possibilities are...(though I welcome mentioning others!)
- perhaps my iPad is simply too old. at this point it is maybe 6-7 years old? though it generally works fine on 1080p video, just chokes when the video gets particularly "heavy" in effects. some people said with newer iPads they still had this issue, but hard to know when those comments were from
- do media players matter for this sort of thing? I'm using VLC on ipad though I could happily change to something else, I'm not using any power user features. I would assume that decoding is sort of a commodity thing at this point, but who knows
- perhaps encoding matters? I doubt mkv should matter as such as it's just a container, but perhaps there are encodings that are more "iPad friendly"? I am decently familiar with ffmpeg at this point (eg pretty good at finding what I need on stack overflow) so if some sort of re-encoding could "optimize" it for the iPad that would work, though I'm not sure how much of a hit in quality that will be (what little I know of the ripping community seems like they obsess quite a bit over these details, but I have no clue if it matters or not?)
- I suppose I could try to get 720p instead of 1080p, as you can't really see the difference on an iPad. I'd rather not if I could avoid it, because sometimes I watch things on my computer/TV (where you can see the difference), and sometimes on my iPad, so it's nice to just have one file and not have to juggle different files...but if this is the only option, that's all ther eis to it.
-??? your suggestion here
Response by poster: ah, good point to clarify. I am copying the videos to the iPad, not streaming them (I've tried streaming and it choked completely lol)
posted by wooh at 7:36 AM on March 13, 2023
posted by wooh at 7:36 AM on March 13, 2023
Most likely issue will be that the iPad has hardware assistance available for H.264 decoding of video with 8 bits per color channel, but not for 10 bits. So the player software has no option but to do it all in software instead, and in scenes with lots of parts all moving at once, a tablet-grade ARM CPU will probably struggle with it.
If your problem were my problem I'd be searching the ffmpeg documentation to find out how to do a recode to 8 bits per color channel. You'll probably end up seeing a bit more banding in dark scenes but it should get the motion smooth again.
posted by flabdablet at 9:14 AM on March 13, 2023
If your problem were my problem I'd be searching the ffmpeg documentation to find out how to do a recode to 8 bits per color channel. You'll probably end up seeing a bit more banding in dark scenes but it should get the motion smooth again.
posted by flabdablet at 9:14 AM on March 13, 2023
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Is the file in your iPad or are you streaming it across a network from a NAS? Because that could be a limiting factor too.
posted by bluecore at 7:24 AM on March 13, 2023