[Love Calm Quiet]

Well, a search found some other complaints but VERY conflicting reports.
Here's situation: I'm comparing my 1.5 AlBook (Tiger) vs. wife's ~600MHz G3 512M ibook (Panther).
Both have QuickTime 7.0.4 just installed. Just got the cache size updated to 4000MB on each.

Going to apple.com/trailers I let each machine cache an entire trailer.

My ALBook plays ANY size (sm, med, large) QT trailer perfectly seemless.

Wife's iBook plays SMALL size QT trailers perfectly.

BUT: iBook playback of (already cached) MEDIUM or LARGE trailers terribly: jerky, missing more than half of frames, etc.

Is that the best we can do with QT? (7.0.4)

How come the G3 will do fine with a DVD full-screen?

Couple years back (earlier OS X version; earlier QT) the G3 iBook would play such trailers FULL-screen smoothly.

Anybody know what's going on? I watch memory usage & there's no paging out - there's memory free. Is there no upgrade that'll help outside a G4 or MacBook?

Good (cheap) news would be appreciated.

[mduell]

With a CPU fresh out of 2000, I'm not really surprised that it's a bit pokey with 2005 codecs. Apple has switched to using H.264 for the non-HD trailers (in addition to the HD trailers), which is a step up in terms of decoding complexity from what they used to use (Sorensen Vsomething), which would explain why they used to play on your iBook.

DVDs are encoded using MPEG2, which is a relatively simple codec to decode.

[gopikrishna]

I've got same issue with a G3 ibook.

Is there no help then? ...like some way to down-grade QT from 7.x?

[Love Calm Quiet]

:bump:
Isn't ANYbody still trying to support a G3 iBook ?

[mduell]

Your CPU is too slow to decode H.264; your choices are to step up to a CPU from the 21st century or watch small trailers.
Downgrading to a previous version of Quicktime or using another player is unlikely to help.

[Tuoder]

Someone had a similar problem before. You might try VLC for playing stuff back. That helped out quite a bit on my iMac G3-400Mhz. I also got a ramdisk utility (Esperance DV) and dropped short stuff into the ramdisk. At the end of the day, however, I'd say the problem is the CPU. Also, make sure nothing else is running when you play stuff back.

[The Godfather]

You gotta get your wife a new MacBook Pro (and I don't mean that you hand her down the G4 laptop).