[mr. burns]

hi, i have a really old mac. a gigabit dual 500 G4. something i've noticed about quicktime is that is performs horribly compared to VLC. i can have world of warcraft open in window mode, have an mp3 playing in itunes and be able to play a video in VLC at great frame rates with no skipping. but when i try to play the same video in quicktime, it's horrible. in most cases, depending on the resolution, the frame rate is so bad i can't even tell what's happening.

i just wanted to know why VLC is so much better at video playback than quicktime? if VLC can play videos so flawlessly on my horribly old computer, why can't quicktime? lazy programming? if it wasn't for VLC not being able to play certain rare files, here and there, i wouldn't even use quicktime.

[CatOne]

Never had any problems with QuickTime... performance has been good for me. But I'm not using a 6+ year old computer, either :-/

[Morpheus]

On my C2D iMac, Apple DVD Player is unable the play the Matrix DVD, (plays it with about 1 fps and the SuperDrive makes strange noises). I thought my SuperDrive is broken.

Then I found out, that on VLC it plays just fine.

[Uncle Skeleton]

I don't know, but my guess is buffering and packet size. VLC as the name suggests (VideoLan Client) was disigned first and foremost as a network video player. That implies that it would read data in a way that takes into account that the data is likely to have imperfect fidelity and inconstant delivery speeds. So with your hard drive or system bus (or something else) nearly maxed out, QT might be reading small data packets at a time, and waiting for them one by one while the hard drive's heads go out to service your other tasks, and VLC might be reading bigger packets, and buffering more of them more aggressively. Just a guess.

[kick52]

maybe VLC takes better use of the dual proccessor?

[rjenkinson]

Originally Posted by kick52 

maybe VLC takes better use of the dual proccessor?

no, because VLC also performs better than quicktime on my G3 and G5 machines.

-r.