Playing the Star Wars 480-wide trailer using QT4 expanded to 1280 width (using resize) is slower than using QT3. With QT3 motion is smooth. With QT4 screen update is jerky with undulating update waves moving down window.

Playing the 640-wide Star Wars episode 1 trailer at double-size, which being Double size rather than an arbitrary resize, ought to be at least somewhat optimized, is even slower, somewhere between two and 4 frames a second. The ripples moving down the window are nauseating to watch. But at least QT4 plays the sound track. QT3 was smoother but silent.

I have a beige G3/300 (1 MB cache) with 224 MB of main memory, no VM, 1280x960 screen, millions of colors, and running MacOS 8.5.1. I downloaded QT4 deluxe. I have not bought QT Pro.

This needs some performance optimization or at least a 600 MHz sawtooth will be needed to get barely-adequate performance. MacOSRumors suggested that rendering would be faster than QT3; shouldn't believe everything I read ;-)

-- Spencer

[AAPl Shareholder]

There is someting wrong with your computer. I have a 266 g3 w/96megs and everything works perfectly.

You may need to defragment your harddisk with norton speed disk. But you should also try rebuilding your desktop, zapping the pram, and running disk first aid.

You should try quicktime with Virtual memory 'on' too. (I would advise leaving Vmem ON with 8.x) That should drop quicktimes memory requirments and may speed things up. Or try upping the memory alotment via the 'get info' window.

Please keep in mind that my complaint was for player windows which had been enlarged, either Double or simply dragged on the resize to be as wide as my 1280-wide screen. It seems to work just fine at Single size. Perhaps better code is used for the Pro version. But *enlarged* movies worked better under QT3, even Double. Since Double is in one of the player's menus, I expected that at least an exact 2:1 ratio would perform well.

There may indeed be something wrong with my computer. Perhaps an extension conflict. But I have already tried Disk First Aid 8.5.1, Norton Disk Doctor 4.0.3, checking out my PRAM with TechTool Pro 2.1.1, checking for fragmentation using Speed Disk 4 (there isn't any), and rebuilding my Desktop, because I am getting frequent crashes with QT 4. But this is a BETA. I expect problems.

Turning on VM is out of the question. I run a recording studio. I have many programs here that REFUSE to run with virtual memory enabled. (Those programs, by the way, are why I have this machine.) That is why I have 224 MB of physical memory. If MacOS 8.5.1 were to crash frequently with VM off, then it would be a useless, broken operating system for Audio professionals. (Which doesn't happen to be the case.)

The suggestion of increasing the memory size (presumably on QT Player) is plausible. I can try that. But you should know that many programs of this sort allocate from system memory, which means that increasing the program's allocation can actually be counterproductive, since it decreases system memory. You can watch the "About this Computer" window (available from the Apple menu) or use a debugger or shareware utility to see that the failing application is really using up all of its memory. I've been bitten both ways on this issue.

-- Spencer

[jock]

I have also experianced problems with the playback of QT4.
I have a 225 604e with 176 megs of ram( no VM),rage pro graphics with 8 megs. I have upped the memory of the player to 10megs and I still get choppy play back on normal size and its useless at full screen on the new star wars QT4 movie. Whats worse is when I play the old version 3 movie at full screen it also drops frames. I note the requirement for this movie to be a 300 G3 or a 400 dos piece of crap. Are Apple serious about these requirements as QT3 seemed to handle this adequately!

There are trade-off for better quality at the same size. Check the lower quality one. They are both about 25 MB.

That should be impressive.

[BlakeSeely]

I am noticing degraded performance and appearance also.

When I run the Star Wars 480 trailer on my G3 233, it actually runs a little slower with QT4.

Even worse, when I resized it with QT3, it still looked really nice, but with QT4, it looks very blocky and pixelated.

Also with QT3, running at thousands of colors looked almost identical to millions - at least the difference was not much. However, with QT4, the trailer running in thousands looks much worse than it did in QT3.

My question is: Will the final version of QT4 still have these problems?

[miro7]

I must say that I run the Star Wars Trailers (sorry not the very newest QT4 version) at full screen with very little slowdown on a 210/604e. I do have a pretty fast 2D card that has QT acceleration, though (MP850). Keep in mind that video acceleration may not be enabled when playing certain video compression types, unless specifically written into the acceleration driver (for instance, most video accelerators accelerate cinepak, but not sorensen, yet). Other things to note:

* Playing the movie with and without sound will always result in the movie without sound being smoother. It has less data to be moved, QT3 or 4 is not the problem there.

* The sound in the previous version of the Star Wars movies was at 22hz, which is the reason why it sounded so flat. The big file was 25meg. Now the Star Wars trailer includes 44hz sound which, with the inclusion of a newer sound codec, makes the size the same--25meg. This is also a possible reason for the less than smooth play of the video compared to the previous versions.

I tried all 3 streaming QT video sites and I found all the video to
be completely unacceptable. I currently have a mediocre 26400
connection. QT3 worked fine with it. With QT4 video would
flicker, (the entire box alternately disappearing and appearing,
and the sound was choppy and undecipherable. That's a word that sums up my entire experience - undecipherable. Can you save the file after it's done streaming, and then play it back? I was not able to do this. I'd rather take the time to download, and view at high quality, than to stream at poor quality.

Man to do the things you want to do (which by the way in my estimation are impractical) you'd not only need to max out your ram but also get one motha of an acceleration board. The new OS is designed to perform even more effectively with vr on and not only that but skip 1 or 2M extra and try 10 or 20M extra.the extra room seems to be a valid solution for me.

Movieplay is worse when:

a) my (cable) internet connection is active. After turning it off, movieplay is much better.

b) The QT4 StarWars trailer sometimes doesn't run smoothly when run in normal size, but the strange thing is that QT performs great when I set the movie size to full screen...(high quality, no interlacing)

Beige G3/333

[cyngus]

Okay, remember, this is a BETA. Do NOT expect perfect performance from it. It is probably that QT4 still has a considerable amount of developmental code in it. Meaning it has not undergone full optimization. As to the originator of this thread, I imagine that your problem lies in VRAM, if you haven't upgrade, you've got 2MB, maybe 6MB. For running those movies at that high resolution you MUST have 8 for a prayer, and really should have more. You're trying to crunch a LOT of pixels. Don't lost hope people, with any luck b22 will be out soon!

Yours,
Justin

A reply to Cygnus/Justin: the screen in question has motherboard video, which is a ATI RAGE Pro, which I have upgraded to 6MB of VRAM. It puts 1280x960 with millions of colors just fine. I don't see why I should need more VRAM for this task; there are no textures to render or anything else funky. Just smoothing which will occupy some amount of processing power but not offscreen VRAM, and frankly if smoothing slows my frame rate down so much I'd like to be able to turn it off.

Yes, I know it's a BETA, and that's why I posted. This system is on a 100base-T switched network (using an AsanteFAST card -- there is a cable modem in the basement) and has another display (an older ATI XCLAIM 3D PCI card with RAGE II and only 4MB of VRAM, set to 1024x768 and millions of colors). These may be relevant, or some of my other extensions, to this performance problem.

The interesting thing is that it is slower than QT3 on a QT3-format movie (480-wide Star Wars trailer). It's really quite impressive that the higher resolution and better sound version occupies no more space, although I wonder if the encoded frame rate is lower (I don't know how to check). So maybe it is my system; maybe it is debugging code. But since plenty of people here claim that they have no such problem, even on nominally slower machines, that suggests it must be my system. The problem is knowing which posters are credible.

Note to glok: here are some programs that hate virtual memory, which run around here but not all on the same machine: Sonic Solutions SonicStudio, Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer, 4-Sight Fax Comms-Server, Vicomsoft Internet Gateway. Check them out; Virtual Memory is not the solution to every problem. I only have 224 MB; prepress Adobe Photoshop users and professional video editors routinely buy MUCH more memory than that.

-- Spencer