Big Sur M1 MacBook Pro

[Pablo Navarro]

Hi, i have a problem. I have a MacBook Pro M1 16GB. Neither video works well. With no resolution. I have videos in H264, mpg, avi, mov, with ProRes 422 Proxy... whatever the video is and the format plays it skipping and with a lot of delay. Any solution? Someone has tried? I have tested it with the version of Qlab 4.6.5 and with the beta that they recently published, in both cases the videos do not work correctly. I hope you can help me. thanks!

[Pablo Navarro]

Video with the problem:

https://youtu.be/4yyI8bMl-Zo

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Pablo,

Thank you for emailing with this information.

Would you mind please emailing sup...@figure53.com so that we may dig in further?  It would help to have a download link to your media files so we can test them on our end too.

Thank you!

Chris

[Chris Ashworth]

Oops, I see that you have already done this. Thank you!

We will be in touch there.

-C

[Sam Kusnetz]

Hello all

We are currently investigating a video rendering problem which we think has to do with Rosetta translation of QLab’s video code.

We have no reason to doubt it can be fixed, but for the time being it looks like video in QLab will not perform acceptably on M1-based Macs.

Folks using QLab for video should absolutely stick to Intel-based Macs until they hear otherwise from us.

Best
Sam

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Sam Kusnetz [he/him/his] (what is this?)
Figure 53
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[Pablo Navarro]

hello, how is the adaptation for mac with M1 going? Cheers

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Pablo,

One thing you can try now: Using videos encoded in ProRes 4444 seems to work around this issue on M1 Macs.

Beyond that, we are still trying to determine exactly what is going on. This bug is a weird one.

More as we learn it,

Best,

C

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[Pablo Navarro]

I just tried your proposed solution and it doesn't work. It does the same problem. Tested on a macbook pro with m1 16GB.I have observed that qlab does not detect the resolution of the devices well. Set a resolution that is not native to either the screen or projectors. Maybe that will help you find the cause of the problem and fix it. If you find any way to solve it please let me know right away so I can continue working. I hope you can solve it soon and we can continue working.Thanks and regards

[Chris Ashworth]

Thank you very much for this report Pablo!

We will continue to hunt and let this list know as soon as we have any news.  It is a very frustrating and strange bug...

-C

[Pablo Navarro]

Hopefully you can fix it soon because it is very frustrating not being able to work with the new Macs and an application as necessary for technicians as qlab. Cheers!

[Pablo Navarro]

Hi! How is everything? How are the advances in the investigation? Any way to be able to use the videos in big sur with M1? Thank you!

[Sam Kusnetz]

Hello Pablo

We are investigating this as fast as we can, and we will definitely post to this group just as soon as we have a beta available to test.

Best
Sam

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Sam Kusnetz [he/him/his] (what is this?)
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https://qlab.app | https://figure53.com

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[Pablo Navarro]

Thanks Sam! I look forward to that beta. Cheers!

[Chris Ashworth]

Additionally, it appears this may possibly be a bug in Rosetta on M1 Macs.  We are currently putting together example code to send to Apple to see if they agree that is a bug on their side.

In the meantime, it is also possible that HAP encoded video can play back successfully, as that type of video is decoded by a different decoder.

-C

[Andy Dolph]

I haven’t heard much talk about HAP, are folks using it successfully? Are there situations (other than maybe on the M1 macs) where it is desirable vs ProRes LT?

[Pablo Navarro]

Hi, I have tried the HAP format solution. Indeed, it works. But there is a serious problem, the definition of the video converted to HAP is really bad. I have done the conversion with the AVF converter as indicated on their website. Do you know how to convert to HAP correctly? Or export from finalcut? I have not found anything about it, it seems that it is a little known format. On the other hand, I agree that it looks like a Rosseta2 bug, but aren't you working on a native version for Mac with M1? I hope you can help me. Thanks and regards!

[micpool]

This screen grab is from 2 video files playing in QLab. (Not on an M1 chip however).

If your observation relates to HAP quality on M1 then ignore the following, but if it's a general  Observation then....

One is HAP, one is ProResHQ.

To maintain the blind test I'm not going to tell you which is which, because at the moment I don't know!

I'll have a look after anyone who wants to, has a guess.

The HAP file was encoded from the ProRes File using Apple Compressor. I used the pass through setting as the base  and just selected HAP codec in the Video Tab Quicktime Settings. 

Mic

[Chris Ashworth]

Hi Pablo,

I’ll leave the HAP question for others who are more knowledgeable (here or at sup...@figure53.com) but an update on the M1 issue: it now looks to us that this may actually be a bug in Apple’s OpenGL implementation on M1 Macs. We compiled a universal test app for our M1 tests and the problem was still present even when not using Rosetta.

While OpenGL is deprecated, it is in theory still supposed to work in Big Sur and on M1. If this is a bug in their OpenGL implementation, we do not know if they will try to fix it.

Our investigation continues. 

-C

[Taylor Glad]

I'd say Mic's HAP file is the one on the left! (Just a little more pixelated)

HAP files have been the go-to codec for Disguise (formerly D3) media players for some time, so it's been accepted professionally for a while.

That being said, it still has its critics. Notch LC is an example of a newer replacement codec for Disguise, and their website (halfway down the page) has an example of their codec compared against a HAP file, and the way they present the HAP files, they do not look too good.

They seem to have zoomed in quite a bit to expose those flaws. In my experience, the files I've converted to HAP using Adobe Media Encoder don't look that bad. So Mic's example is a much fairer side by side comparison.

[micpool]

Correction 

The HAP file is as Taylor identified correctly  the one on the LEFT, but the difference is quite subtle

I've also tried using AVF convert with the same file, and the results seem identical to those with Compressor.

Again this is not on an M1 Mac.

Not having an M1 Mac I don't know if this is an issue with transcoding on that chipset or just the settings you are using.

If you made your HAP from your Prores 422 Proxy file that may be the problem, Although Proxy is widely used for  video playback, generally it will only give good results if you rendered directly  to that codec, or transcoded from at least the standard ProRes 422 codec but preferably ProRe422HQ.

This screenshot shows a 500% magnification of 2 HAP files

The left image was converted to HAP  from A ProRes Proxy conversion of an Original ProRes HQ file and is terrible.

The right image is a  HAP converted from the original ProRes HQ file, and is what I would expect quality wise.

[Taylor Glad]

Lol, that’s good news. 😜

But yeah, I had to zoom in a lot on my computer to tell any difference. From normal audience perspective, it’s pretty indistinguishable.

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Taylor Glad

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[Chris Ashworth]

Hi All,

We now have a beta build available that we believe fixes the video playback issue on Apple Silicon / M1 processors:

https://figure53.com/temp/QLab-4.6.7-b4.zip 

This build also includes several fixes for bugs when running on Big Sur.

We would greatly appreciate hearing back from anyone with M1 Macs to learn if this build plays video correctly for you.

We currently believe that the source of the problem was a bug in the Apple Silicon implementation of a particular portion of OpenGL. This build should work around the issue.

Thanks,

Chris

[Ruud Boon]

Great news! Looks good so far!