Anecdotal user reports say that the new MacBooks are much more adept at playing Hi-Def video than the the previous generation MacBook Pro. The Aluminum MacBook's processor runs around 75% slower when playing back 1080p, h.264 movies.
Why? The speculation says that the new MacBooks might have support for hardware decoding of the h.264 video codec built in to the new NVIDIA 9400M graphics chipset. Until Apple gives official confirmation (unlikely), this will remain as speculation, but the fact that a MacBook can play the same file as a last-gen MacBook Pro with the CPU at just 28% of full power versus 100% tells us that something is going on.
It makes a lot of sense. Apple has slowly been shifting processor intensive tasks off to the GPU, and even Adobe has offloaded a lot of the heavy graphical work to the graphics processor in Photoshop CS4. What we need now is a hardware video encoder. That way we won't have to wait for hours and hours for Handbrake to rip our DVDs.
Apple Enabled GPU Hardware Decoding of h.264 on New MacBooks, Pros and Airs? [MacRumors]
