Apple Player Update Beta Testing - Archive

[cassiusclyde]

@Craig_Holliday

One Big Update:

After reviewing the feedback over the weekend, we realized we had made a mistake. We have a feature flag that enables the MoltenVK/Metal renderer, but that feature flag was disabled.

This means the previous testing was only for the MPV update and not the new renderer, which has had some improvements but not to the extent we want.

That said, we have enabled the new renderer. You can now test with the same build to see if there are stutters, thermal throttling, playback failures, etc.

This has made a huge difference! This was my experience a couple of days ago when the flag was disabled:

@cassiusclyde

The new thermal state parameter did change from ‘nominal’ to ‘fair’ to ‘serious’ after several minutes of playback with the couple of 4K Dolby Vision remuxes I’ve tried. I’ve also noticed some (< 40) dropped frames when it got hotter with one of the files, but not with the others.

Now when I’m playing the same files the thermal state stays ‘nominal’ after 30 minutes of playback, the box is quite a bit cooler, and no frames are being dropped!
Even more importantly, the dynamic RPUs are seemingly being applied now when playing back these Profile 8 files. That’s great progress! Edit: The tone mapping is absolutely wrong though, very dim highlights and actually looks worse than before, but I think any change here is still a step in the right direction. Edit 2: It’s still fake DV, after all.