I fear this will be rather lengthy...
When I got my 333 MHz PowerBook G3 last December, one of the truly amazing and impressive features was the ability to connected the PowerBook to a television via the S-Video connector and watch my Mac on television in Video Mirroring Mode. I put this feature to use at school, often showing QuickTime movies downloaded from Apple's Movie Trailers web site to my classes here in Japan.
My PowerBook shipped with OS 9.0 and QuickTime 4.1. In Video Mirroring Mode, QuickTime movies played nearly flawlessly. That was until OS 9.0.4.
After installing OS 9.0.4, I could no longer play QuickTime movies with the PowerBook in Video Mirroring Mode. Well, I could play them, however playback was awful. Playback was stuttered with dropped frames. Frame rates were so low that it was more like watching a slide show than a movie.
I asked around and was given many suggestions. I was told to upgrade to QuickTime 4.1.1 and then 4.1.2 (I did). I was told to give QuickTime more memory (I gave it 50 MB). I was told to trash a variety of preferences (Sayonara preferences files.) I was told to reduce screen resolution and number of colors (640x480 @ 256 colors). Virtual Memory on; Virtual Memory Off. Nothing worked.
I did my own trouble shooting which consisted of doing a clean install of the original OS 9 System Folder (as well as leaving the OS 9.0.4 System Folder on the disk) as well as making several ATI driver packages. In addition to the original OS 9 and the OS 9.0.4 drivers, there were several intermediary sets released with updates from Apple, such as the Multimedia Update 1.0. I connected the PowerBook to a television. Starting with OS 9 and the original ATI drivers, I played a QuickTime movie, noted the results, switched ATI drivers, rebooted, then played a QuickTime movie. I worked my way through both OSes and all the ATI driver packages (5).
In general, I discovered that playback degraded with each ATI driver package upgrade. The worst was the set of drivers that shipped with OS 9.0.4. I also discovered that something in OS 9.0.4 exacerbated the problem; playback was worse in OS 9.0.4 for any given ATI dirver package compared with OS 9.0.
This summer I purchased an iMac DV+. This iMac shipped with yet another version of ATI drivers. I tried these on my PowerBook; QuickTime playback remained poor in Video Mirroring Mode. I purchased TechToo Pro 3.0.1 and it shipped with yet another set of ATI drivers. Tried those too with similar results.
Then comes along QuickTime 5.0 Public Preview 1. I downloaded and installed the latest edition of QuickTime without even considering this may by chance solve my Video Mirroring problem.
One day, after installing QT 5, I was between classes at school working on my PowerBook. The PowerBook was connected to the AV system at school and was in Video Mirroring mode (I was showing Web Pages to my classes). For some reason I wanted to check out the trailer for the new Tom Hanks movie, "Cast Away." I opened the movie and as before, playback was just awful. I cannot explain why I did this, but at that moment I pressed "Command" and "3"--the QuickTime Player key combo to cause a movie to fill the screen.
Much to my surprise, playback was much improved in "Full Screen Mode". Much improved is an understatement; instead of the previous slide show like playback, playback now resembled motion. To be sure, motion was not smooth--it was still somewhat jerky as if watching a "claymation" movie--but it was far better than the previous slide show of still images. Odd was that at normal size or double size there was no improvement in playback. I was not greedy and would take what I could get.
With the announcement of QuickTime 5.0 Public Preview 2, my hopes for improved movie playback in Video Mirroring Mode were high and for the most part QT 5.0 PP2 delivered. This version of QT provides even more fluid playback. Some odd quirks remain. For example, QT movies will not play smoothly at their default, normal size; only when resized will the play with fluid motion. Unlike PP1, however, doubling the size of the movie works as does simply grabbing the lower right corner of the movie window and making it slightly larger or smaller.
Leave it to ATI to rain on this personal parade of good news.
Included with the latest update to CroMag Rally from Pangea Software (version 1.0.5) is an Open GL update. This Open GL update contains version 1.2.1. In addition, it also contains a new set of ATI drivers more recent than those included with my iMac DV+ or TechTool Pro 3.0.1. Hoping against hope that with these drivers ATI and/or Apple may have fixed the Video Mirroring bug that got progressively worse with each previous upgrade, I installed these drivers on my PowerBook. Big mistake.
After installing the latest and greatest drivers from ATI I found myself without any QuickTime movie playback whatsoever in Video Mirroring Mode. QuickTime movies would play sound just fine, but no image will display in most cases. In a few cases, a movie may display 3-5 images over the course of a two minute movie.
Thank you ATI.
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