Yes, that is similar to my experience with a 5k iMac. That's why I think the HighRes Retina Display of the MacBook Pro is the cause. You would probably need to set the window size very small to get a better playback performance. It's exaggerated on the Retina MacBook Pro as it offers a native 2560/1600 resolution on a 15" display, so, a better performing window size will result in a tiny video size. I'm still not sure if the actual video viewport resolution is the problem, as I can play half decode-res (999/540) in full screen on my older 15"/1440/900 MBP  without any dropped frames, which would still be an acceptable viewport size on the much faster Retina Mac Book.

But, as that Retina machine even has trouble previewing the BBB source file in near-SD resolution in dcp-o-matic main, there must be something about the current display method causing this.

Carl is working on some hardware accelerated display method (e.g. OpenGL), but that's not ready for primetime, and it may be complicated to support it multi-platform (even though OpenGL is supported on all three common platforms). Maybe it is not the actual video output, but the color conversion? But that should strongly benefit from a faster CPU as between my older 4core MBP and that most recent 6core, but, the results do not cover that assumption.

I was trying to get Carl to set the video display optionally to the same size (or integer mutiples) of the actual decoded resolution, so to avoid scaling. Using the mouse and window resize elements, it is impossible to set it to a specific viewport resolution like 999/540 for half-flat.

So far, he hasn't been triggered by that idea. Maybe he missed it where I mentioned it. Maybe I should file a Mantis entry for it.

I am a bit concerned for that bad playback performance making it into 2.14 stable, as I notice many beginners are irritated about the dropped frames when testing their DCPs. Especially since Apple is nearly exclusively sold on those very high res displays now. Usually users can tweak it after some instruction about decode resolution and window size, but, as I saw it on that popular current MBP15", it can't be tweaked to a satisfying result.

- Carsten