Will Tiger (or new quicktime) help with HD decoding

nebagakidnebagakid
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Any should try now playing this five minute LOTR clip (torrent download) and see if your CPU can handle it. My 1.5Ghz G4 couldn't... a new iMac G5 got it but it was not smooth. You need a 2.5Ghz G5 to get it to be nice.



Will Tiger , or a new quicktime within Tiger, help to make playing HD on lower processors any smoother?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    rara Posts: 623member
    The optimist in me says... yes. I have nothing to base this on other that Apple's history of speeding things up with every new version of OS X.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    thininethinine Posts: 71member
    What graphics card do you have? A computer with a GF5200 or greater or Radeon 9600 or greater will be able to take advantage of Core Video in Tiger, which should provide some help for playing heavier files. Though I can't be sure. Are you using a PowerBook or something? If so, I may be able to test this on the very computer you use, since my friend has one.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    nebagakidnebagakid Posts: 2,692member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Thinine

    What graphics card do you have? A computer with a GF5200 or greater or Radeon 9600 or greater will be able to take advantage of Core Video in Tiger, which should provide some help for playing heavier files. Though I can't be sure. Are you using a PowerBook or something? If so, I may be able to test this on the very computer you use, since my friend has one.



    I have a 1.5Ghz AluBoook



    to get nice motion you really need a 2.5Ghz dual G5's with Panther right now
  • Reply 4 of 8
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    Naaa. This all has to do with program you are using to play the file. EyeTV is optimized for MPEG2 playback and Elgato actually created their own CODEC because Quicktime was sooo slow. HDTV works fine on my bro's single 1.8Ghz G5, as long as he uses this program.



    I imagine if someone created a program that actually uses MPEG hardware support on graphic cards, your system requirements would be much, much lower.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Ow! That clip brought my computer to it's knees, maxing out both processors. I'm guessing it plays at around 15 fps on my rig.



    (Dual 1.4 G4 on 100mhz bus + 2G ram + Radeon 8500 running at 350mhz)



    Let's hope 10.4 brings core goodness to old macs. Throw a radeon 9800 in this box and 10.4 just might fly on HD stuff.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    gregmightdothatgregmightdothat Posts: 1,709member
    There's a couple reasons why this video is slow.



    For starters, it has a buggy compression, which doesn't help things.



    That aside, it's 500 MB for like 30 seconds. That doesn't fit RAM unless you have at least 1 GB, meaning that halfway through the movie it has to pause as it loads a large portion of RAM from your hard disk.



    Now, because it's SO ridiculously large (is it 1600x1200? I can't tell for sure, since the header is garbled), that's a lot of video just to feed to the video card... about 1318 MB/sec after decompression. AGP 4X can only handle just over 1 GB/sec, so that's lots of dropped frames on anything other than a G5.



    That clip is ripped from TV, which is inherently lo-res. In fact, that video is encoded at a level of detail about an order of magnitude higher than exists on TV, which is why it's so blurry. If it were left at TV resolution, it would be closer to 50 megs, would have the same detail, and would play perfectly even on really old machines.



    In short, your G4 is just fine for *real* HD video. That LOTR clip, though, is f'in ridiculous and won't play right in any computer for another couple years when hardware has doubled a couple times. For a good reference, a well compressed, high quality video is maybe about 175 K/sec. The LOTR clip is 1800+ K/sec.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    There are so many things... like... wrong with that post. I will do my best.



    Ready.

    1) There do not seem to be large/noticable errors in the compression. Use VLC if you don't have EyeTV. Although audio didn't work for me in VLC.

    2) It is most definitely longer than 30 seconds. More like 6 minutes. (Did you get the whole file?) And HDTV uses a streaming MPEG2 transport stream which means the entire thing is not loaded into ram at once. Therefore much less stressful on the computer.

    3) The resolution of HDTV is 1920 x 1088. I won't even begin with the AGP 4x stuff. I built a HDTV PVR that used a $40 FX5200 graphics card. That thing could display HDTV on a 900Mhz processor with hardware support enabled. The problem is with our Macs. There is no hardware support that I know of. All the decoding is done in software and that software (like quicktime) is just cold-molasses slow.

    4) A single HDTV channel has approximately 20mbps of bandwidth. The stream can not exceed that and usually averages 18mbps.

    5) The picture is a bit blurry. Although some may have been caused by scaling, fast-action requires much more bandwidth than still images. There needs to be a compromise.

    6) a 175k/s HDTV stream is LUDICROUS! Cue Spaceballs



    7) Just for fun... Some more HDTV samples as torrents



    BTW, I don't mean to sound hostile at all. I'm just passionate about my HDTV.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Thank you Ebby... i didn't know where to start on that one.



    The entire clip was in ram

    The clip is over 5 minutes long

    This G4 has a 2xAGP

    There are no encoding errors

    It is encoded in 'real' HD



    The 2x slot and radeon 8500 are way more than sufficient to play back full HD content.



    The problem is purely that even this dual g4 1.4 is too slow to play HD given the current codec's inefficient use of hardware, including GPU. If the GPU is tapped, the rest of the system is no longer the bottleneck and playback is fine.



    I'm unsure if 10.4 and it's core technologies, or at least those involved in HD playback, will be supported by the radeon 8500. With 10.4 and a radeon 9800 pro, I expect HD to play flawlessly.
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