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Last week's GDC Battlefield 4 demo looked pretty spectacular, even when viewed via heavily compressed streaming video, so when we acquired a high-bitrate 1080p version of the trailer running at the full 60 frames per second, we knew we had to share it with you. The only problem: actually getting the footage to run smoothly on a webpage.It transpires that there's a pretty good reason YouTube supports pretty much every type of video format you care to mention except 60 frames per second playback - across a range of browsers the Flash renderer appears to have massive issues sustaining any kind of update north of 30FPS, even if you're using a fast desktop PC. Our usual strategy for running non-standard video - encoding the files ourselves and plugging them directly into the Eurogamer player - didn't seem to work out this time.
However, after a weekend of testing across various hardware, we found a solution: Chrome offers a substantial performance boost in video playback - the 35-40FPS we saw on a five-year-old Core 2 Duo laptop running Firefox shot up to 55-60FPS on the standard-def encode embedded below. Factoring in mind how laggy streaming video can be in general, a move over to the Google browser could in theory yield dividends across a range of sites. Alternatively, in the case of these Battlefield videos at least, iOS hardware from the iPad/iPhone 4 onwards seems to run both SD and HD versions of the trailer pretty much flawlessly.
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