Compressed HD/Blu-ray playback on the Mac

In a word - sad.

Never mind the fact that there isn't a single, true blu-ray playback app for the Mac. The real problem is that OS X and apps written for OS X perform incredibly poorly when playing back compressed HD. And by that I mean perform poorly when compared to Windows apps.

I believe this is the real reason for Steve's "bag of hurt". Many Macs simply can't smoothly playback the typical video found on a blu-ray. I don't know if this is due to inherent inefficiencies in OS X, a lack of development in this area or if it is an OpenGL vs. DirectX thing.

And this is all made worse by the fact that, as of now, there is practically no hardware decoding acceleration on the Mac. From what I hear, Apple did finally make some APIs in this area public last spring, but that has not yielded much progress. The only app I know of that makes any use of any hardware acceleration is a beta version of Plex and even then only on a very limited set of video cards.

But it's not just about hardware decoding acceleration. Even with hardware acceleration turned off, my modest, 3-year old Windows box (2.2 GHz AMD Phenom) plays blu-rays with ease. I'm talking blu-rays with h.264 and VC-1 video up in the 40Mbps+ range. Whereas my 3-year old MacBook Pro (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo) can't even smoothly playback an h.264 video in the 13.5Mbps range. The difference is even worse when talking about VC-1 encoded videos. This is a huge difference in performance between Windows and OS X. Now, granted, I'm comparing roughly 3-year old machines and the latest Macs may have enough raw horsepower to cover up this difference in efficiency, but the difference is still there.

I'm primarily a Mac guy, so this is very disappointing and frustrating. Maybe there is a pleasant surprise just around the corner, but I'm betting not.

Roxio

What horrible tech support!

Earlier this year, I purchased a copy of Roxio's Toast Titanium 10 with the HD plugin option. Altogether, about $120. Not cheap.
I had a problem with Toast not correctly multiplexing recordings from my Hauppauge HD-PVR. During the muxing process, Toast will just quit muxing prematurely and move on to the next stage without warning, leaving you with an incomplete recording (which you could easily miss if you don't check your results carefully.) Now granted, this was not happening all the time and when it did happen, it seemed to be with more problematic recordings from VHS. But, the thing is that the same file would mux correctly using other software tools. So Toast obviously had a problem.
So I contacted Roxio tech support.
I won't bore you with all the details, but it took about a month to get a response. And when I did get a response, it was the standard uninstall-reinstall advice. I sent them the output from my System Profiler. They replied they couldn't open it. Which says to me their tech support people are doing Mac support on Windows machines. I asked them "What next?" and even suggested they allow me to upload samples they could process themselves and see the problem. Their response was "Considering the extensive, unsuccessful trouble shooting attempts of your problem we are unable to offer you any further solutions for your issue and will have to discontinue any further support." So they consider uninstall-reinstall extensive. They did offer a refund. I told them I didn't want a refund (besides, considering how things had gone up to that point, I'd never see the refund anyway), I wanted them to support their software. That's basically where it ended.
So, in my opinion, Roxio has no tech support.


Don't get me wrong, there are some good things about this software package and it is a very important package for the Mac as there are few alternatives for some of the functionality in this package. Which makes it all the more frustrating that it is not supported.


So if you are someone who gets very annoyed with this kind of lack of support, you might want to look at other alternatives if possible. If not, it is a very useful software package to have. I'm just not confident about it's future.