#to be clear I've only got the VLC one on so I can do comparative shots easy

[spockvarietyhour]

Three different ways to colour your battlecruiser [top, Director’s Edition 2022, middle, TMP BluRay, bottom, 4K Remaster]

[impurelight]

Mac OS High Sierra - ♪ I Love It ♪

I recently installed the High Sierra public beta and I'm glad I did. Let's go back to WWDC 2017. Craig uttered this brief statement that felt like an afterthought, "We even moved the window manager to use Metal." I believe he also said something about how the most difficult animations would be accelerated using Metal or something. But this didn't seem too important to Apple in the grand scheme of things.

When he said this my ears perked up. Could it be? Has Apple finally fixed the stuttering of animations? I have wanted to try High Sierra ever since. And now that I had some time with High Sierra I have to say that this change does indeed fix those issues. 99% of the time anyways.

When I first got my Pro the animations were noticeably choppy. So much so that I kept the resolution at 1280x800 rather than the retina resolution of 2560x1600 just to avoid the choppiness. High Sierra is not perfect. There's definitely a little bit of choppiness going on, especially when moving from a full screen application to the desktop, and I suspect the animations aren't a crispy 60FPS.

But the difference between Sierra and High Sierra are like night and day. I can finally use my Mac at the retina resolution without pulling my hair out in frustration. It actually looks like the demo laptops in the Apple Store.

This makes me a lot more hopeful for the MacBook Adorable. The graphics on that thing should be about the same as my MacBook Pro so I'm a lot less worried about stuttering on that now.

That's the really big thing in High Sierra. This choppiness that was present since I got it has finally been fixed. But there are a few other important changes I'd like to discuss.

First is APFS. I thought this would be a bigger deal than it ended up being. Every time I need to change the file system I've had to format a drive so Apple doing it in place is basically magic.

In fact they did it so well I didn't even notice anything changed. When it restarted after the update it showed me all my Windows from before I restarted, a feature I'm shocked Windows has not copied yet, so I didn't know if anything actually changed. I had to look at my disk properties to see: APFS, oh, it actually worked. Speaking of which the main drive now appears in the Finder side bar. A small change.

I haven't seen any speed improvements yet. My Mac was fast enough already. I've seen APFS actually doing worse compared to HFS+ in benchmarks. I'd suspect that's accurate. From what I hear APFS has to write more and more detailed metadata. But in real world scenarios it may be faster.

Now let's talk about Safari. Safari has had perhaps the most changes out of all the apps I've used. First of all the block autoplaying videos is very nice. I know what you're thinking, "But how often do I encounter autoplaying videos?". And you're right but it also blocks youtube videos that are in the background. Not foreground ones, they work normally.

I open a lot of Youtube videos and they take a bit of time to load so sometimes I do something else and then suddenly the youtube video starts playing in the background. Annoying. In High Sierra it's no more. It's one of those things like picture in picture that I didn't think was such a big deal until I actually started using it.

Of course not all the Safari changes are so awesome. The 'always on' reader that they trumpeted is nothing more than an option to automatically open the reader view when opening a page. Also you can definitely tell Apple changed the title font here. I don't like it, hopefully I'll get used to it though. Also it is now harder to get out of the reader mode. You now have to physically click on the reader icon. This is very annoying as text to speech automatically enters this view.

I hope they change it; I already sent a complaint about it to Apple. I recognize a lot of people don't use Safari but I do because of the text to speech integration and the view all tabs options (that firefox removed for some reason).

The view all tabs is, first of all, much faster. It got the Metal treatment. They also don't stack the tabs anymore and they don't load all thumbnails at once. Probably to help with performance but it looks a bit janky.

There are also a few useful tweaks. This may just be me, but the battery life may have gotten better. Well, I'm reaching for the charger less. It might be because of Metal being less graphically taxing especially while watching YouTube videos or maybe APFS is allowing processes to be more efficient. I heard APFS allows for multiple processes to read a file now which I'd imagine increases efficiency by decreasing the reliance on locks and lends to more bursty tasks meaning more time for the CPU to be idle. But what do I know? It could just be me, though, I'm not using any tools to measure my battery life.

There's also a new Wifi icon. At least I think it's new and I believe status bar icons have been spread out a bit more. Finally there is HEVC and HEIC. HEIC will probably become a big deal but I don't see it being important for a long time.

HEVC is overrated. Sure, the OS supports it. But I never use the built in video player so the only benefit I'll get is files encoded in H.265 will now have thumbnails. Because apparently a lot of video players already support H.265. I'm using IINA, basically a prettier version of VLC, and it supports it. I think Apple just popularized it, they aren't actually doing anything meaningful with it. Just like how Apple popularized Helvetica fonts, well they did for me anyways. So this next section concerns mostly H.265.

The hype for H.265 is real. H.265 video takes up a lot less space compared to H.264 and I have not noticed any performance dip when playing it back at 2x speed. I used to compare video codecs to see which one used the least space. I stopped because the change was never that significant (like 10%) but H.265 might get me into it again as using handbrake the difference in size is like 50%. It's huge.

The only downside to H.265 is that video is too clear. Using handbrake the outputted video appears to be less grainy. The difference is slight but it's there and you'll probably notice it on some level when viewing low res video although to actually see what's going on you'll have to compare individual frames. The H.265 video just doesn't seem as crisp. I believe these are compression artifacts being stripped away. This makes the video look a bit softer which I don't appreciate. Now I know why many games have a graphics setting called 'film grain'.

The weird thing about handbrake is it saves H.265 files using .mp4 or .mkv file extensions. When I save a H.265 file I expect it to be using a dedicated H.265 file extension like .hevc. This is like saving a JPG using .png or a markdown file as .txt or an mp3 file as .wav or a GIF using .jif. Madness. Absolute madness. Well that's video codecs for you. They make no sense.

So the last thing I'd like to talk about are the bugs. There's definitely a lot of them in High Sierra. However when I restarted my Mac, like actually restarted not that automatic restart that happens when you upgrade, things got a lot better. Still a few bugs though.

Update: This only applies to public beta 1.

All in all High Sierra is stellar release. I think one of the Mac OS versions promised to fix a bunch of bugs. But I never noticed any differences. And new OS versions in general, whether it be Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, or even Linux have gotten pretty stale with only the occasional feature appearing every so often. High Sierra feels like a big upgrade. If only because it fixes a problem I've had for so long.