by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
October 7th, 2008 @ 7:06 am

Here’s a tale of how a humble Mac Mini system outperformed my cutting-edge quad-core system. It’s also a story of how Apple can’t write good software for the Windows platform. QuickTime hates WindowsThe other day I was chatting to George Ou about professional grade digital SLR cameras that offer 1080p video capability.

He then mentioned how his system (an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz PC system with an NVIDIA 8800GT GPU) couldn’t handle 1080p H.264 QuickTime movies. Thinking that it might be an issue with his system, I downloaded some test clips and tried playing them with Apple QuickTime on my 3.0GHz quad-core QX9650 Vista 64-bit system - This rig is kitted out with Velociraptor drives, 8GB of fast RAM and a Crossfire quad-GPU setup.

The results - Awful. The clip was jerky and juddery, and while not technically unwatchable, I really didn’t want to spend too long looking at it. Now let’s get some perspective on this. My system is capable of flawless Blu-ray H.264 1080p video playback and so the system is operating normally. However, just to be sure that this wasn’t some random issue I also tried the clip on a few other systems that are not as powerful as my rig, but still very capable (all get a top score of 5.9 on the Windows Experience Index scale).

Same results. The video seem to stutter every second or so and this continues throughout the clip. I then tried some other clips. Same results. I swapped out the video card in my system for an NVIDIA 280GTX graphics card. Same results. I tried Vista 32-bit and Vista 64-bit. Same results. No matter how much hardware I threw at the problem, the stuttering video persisted.