At least Apple doesn’t force you to download it with iTunes anymore, but it seems odd that Apple would hurl stones at Adobe while sitting inside of a house made of shimmering non-Gorilla Glass. I considered just dropping it from the test, but I decided it’d be a worthy public service advisory to remind people just how much of a fail QuickTime 7 is. mov file, which is Apple’s own QuickTime file format. I actually gave up after several attempts to make it work. On the Radius 12 with its Core i7 Skylake CPU, it could not even play the video file without constantly dropping frames. This has been a horrible player for years, and it hasn’t gotten any better. The fail boat was boarded by the QuickTime 7 player. The QuickTime Player is still horribly broken, and Apple doesn’t seem to care. On my laptop, when battery life matters, I’ll have to skip it. VLC’s subtitle support is great and I’ll still use it, but mostly on my desktop. Besides manually setting the screen brightness, all of the testing was also done with the default power settings for the OS. Surface Book shootout.Īll of the testing was done on Windows 10 before the TH2 patch was released, and in airplane mode.

I even used the same Samsung earbuds as I did with the MacBook Pro 13 vs. The screen was set at a relatively bright 260 nits (as close as I could get to 250) and the audio was on.

MOV file with a resolution of 3840×1714, encoded in H.264 using the high 5.1 profile. For my test, I wanted to keep the video expectations very high, so I used the same 6GB UltraHD 4K Tears of Steel video (open-source) that I used in my MacBook Pro 13 vs. I know from the excellent testing that ’s Tim Schiesser ran two years ago that lower resolution and lower bit rate increases battery life. I actually wanted a laptop with a modest battery life rather than, say, Microsoft’s Surface Book, which can take half a day to zero. Even if another laptop has a larger battery, or a smaller screen, however, I believe the results should scale.įor my video rundown test, I used the 4K version of the free open-source Tears of Steel short movie. Our rundown test used a Toshiba Radius 12 with a Core i7 Skylake CPU and 12-inch UltraHD 4K resolution screen.įor my testing platform, I picked Toshiba’s new Radius 12 running Windows 10. The laptop gave me Intel’s latest Skylake CPU, a moderately sized battery, and, with its 4K panel, the low end of run time.

What is vlc media player for