[LeeG]

Got a new 2Ghz core duo imac. Should fly right? When I try to play a video in itunes (say lazy sunday for example), I get a beachball. Stuttering, slow, miserable. Barely playable, and used to play fine on my G4 1.4.

The activity monitor shows the processors barely working at all - what gives?

L

[wataru]

iTunes video playback is pretty terrible on all machines. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point.

[ShotgunEd]

I disagree.

While iTunes videos are completely unplayable on my iBook G3 500 (its to be expected) they play instantly and at a very good frame rate on my 1.25 Dual G4.

[Krypton]

Originally Posted by wataru

iTunes video playback is pretty terrible on all machines. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point.

Indeed; I've been 'told' it's a known issue.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by ShotgunEd

While iTunes videos are completely unplayable on my iBook G3 500 (its to be expected)

Is that really to be expected? I find on my iBook G4 800MHz that videos that play perfectly fine in QuickTime Player or VLC, etc. are godawful slow in iTunes, especially w.r.t. scrubbing, resizing, and tolerating background apps.

[Artanis]

Originally Posted by LeeG

Got a new 2Ghz core duo imac. Should fly right? When I try to play a video in itunes (say lazy sunday for example), I get a beachball. Stuttering, slow, miserable. Barely playable, and used to play fine on my G4 1.4.

The activity monitor shows the processors barely working at all - what gives?

L

Use VLC to see if they are played right. If still not than it is a hardware problem, if yes keep using VLC

I really don't understand the apple company when it comes to video playing capabilities.

[ccrider]

My old imac 800 g4 stutters like mad playing new video format.

Could it be the decryption process? Whatever it the problem, it sux. I've tried it through iTunes, quicktime, and even front row (thanks andrew )

All stutter like crazy.

[EFFENDI]

H264 decoding is extremely processor intensive, and requires more memory as well.

However, I have personally never experienced delays in iTunes or any other app, or stuttering/jittery playback with my Core Duo Mac mini, except for some of the larger 30fps 1080p videos.

EDIT: LeeG, I just noticed that your iMac has just 256MB of RAM?? Is this correct? This will also affect video playback considerably. You should heavily consider upgrading, at the very least, to 512MB.

[dru]

Originally Posted by ShotgunEd

I disagree.

While iTunes videos are completely unplayable on my iBook G3 500 (its to be expected) they play instantly and at a very good frame rate on my 1.25 Dual G4.

I'm quite doubtful based on my own abysmal experiences. How about some more info: are these the "old" smaller videos or the most recent iTunes 7 larger videos?

[dru]

Originally Posted by Artanis

Use VLC to see if they are played right. If still not than it is a hardware problem, if yes keep using VLC

I really don't understand the apple company when it comes to video playing capabilities.

+++

mplayer and VLC outshine Quicktime and (the even worse) iTunes both when it comes to smooth playback on modest hardware. I haven't any idea what Apple's problem is with being unable to scale its playback experience.

Do the engineers/QA folk not have access to the low-end hardware? Maybe teh Steve should have to use the base system for a week.

This is exacerbated by MS killed the crummy WMP and making us use QT components. Depending on the content, it's easier for me to go through a re-encoding and use VLC or mplayer to get a smooth playback experience. This is really quite ridiculous.

One tip on QT, sometimes it helps to have the tracks preload and cached if you have enough RAM. You have to resave and then close and reopen the QT file to ensure QT notices, however.

[Gee4orce]

This is definitely a bug in iTunes - newly encoded h.264 plays fine for me, but newly encoded MPEG4 is absolutely awful - it only seems to play the keyframes (ie about 1 or 2 per second !). Playing the same movies in Quicktime works just fine, and my iPod plays them back fine too.

At least now we know what happened to the engineers who got kicked off the Aperture team. Is Apple hiring ex Microsoft programmers now or something ?

[LeeG]

Yeah - I know - I have upgraded to 2Gb. Seems the issue is fixed lately...

L

[MindFad]

Originally Posted by Gee4orce

At least now we know what happened to the engineers who got kicked off the Aperture team. Is Apple hiring ex Microsoft programmers now or something ?

What's this about engineers getting kicked off the Aperture team?

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally Posted by MindFad

What's this about engineers getting kicked off the Aperture team?

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html

[MRTrauffer]

I've noticed the same "stuttering" when playing back videos in iTunes. However, when I set the playback resolution to normal, or double size, it plays smooth. My guess is that when a playback window is resized to an odd resolution, the video will stutter.

[Gee4orce]

Hmm. doesn't cure the problem for me