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Stratus Fear · Apr 29, 2005, 10:40 PM

A couple things I noticed while watching the Tiger seminar:

H.264 performs like crap in anything other than the video's actual size or smaller. I have a high-end Powerbook and this thing won't run full screen without dropping frames or falling out of sync. What gives? It doesn't seem like this should be such an issue on a machine like this. Also, what's the deal with live resizing? It doesn't appear to work with H.264 videos. Anybody else have this experience as well?

sideus · Apr 29, 2005, 10:55 PM

I think H.264 brings a G4 to it's knees. I have a dual 867MHz and any H.264 video drops frames like crazy. The siminar video and especially the HD showcase videos

Applefreak01 · Apr 29, 2005, 11:07 PM

Yep. The siminar video is totally unplayable on my iBook G3 900MHz.

Oedipax · Apr 29, 2005, 11:14 PM

I've noticed when I minimize a Quicktime video as it's playing, not only does it not keep playing in the dock (wasn't that supposed to be a new feature?) I also can't click on the dock icon to bring it up again. The only way I've found is to alt-tab to it. Any ideas?

Stratus Fear · Apr 29, 2005, 11:23 PM

I guess I can see dual G4s not having much better luck -- I don't think video decoding is really all that multithreaded. After playing around some more, the H.264 videos play ok on my G4 (meaning no frames dropped) as long as I don't resize the window at all. I guess it spends too much time decoding that it can't scale the video worth anything.

I had the same issues with the Quicktime in the Dock, too, so it isn't just you, Oedipax.

Anubis IV · Apr 29, 2005, 11:44 PM

I just found it to be a CPU hog. I literally had to quit EVERY application that was running (including the Finder, though I'm not sure if that was or wasn't a bit of overkill) to get the HD movie trailers to run without dropping frames on my 800MHz G4 TiPB. Besides that, when the little intro window that came up when I first launched Quicktime was running in the background, it ate up almost all of the available CPU cycles. Slowed the rest of my applications down to a crawl.

ckohler · Apr 30, 2005, 12:00 AM

Originally Posted by Anubis IV

I literally had to quit EVERY application that was running (including the Finder, though I'm not sure if that was or wasn't a bit of overkill) to get the HD movie trailers to run without dropping frames on my 800MHz G4 TiPB.

Those HD movie trailers are not made for G4 playback. It even says on the page that they are only for G5's.

alphasubzero949 · Apr 30, 2005, 12:14 AM

QT 7 on Panther is garbage. Lots of CPU being eaten up.

d0ubled0wn · 12:33 AM

I have two tasks taking gobs of cpu (Tiger), mdi and mdimport. Probably unrelated to QT7 because it's not even running. Anybody know what these tasks are? I know for a fact that these tasks weren't running on Panther.

Kingdom of Heaven trailer runs perfect on my dual 1.25 G4, but the Batman trailer runs like crap.

edit: nevermind, I'm sure it's just Spotlight doing its thing

alphasubzero949 · Apr 30, 2005, 05:28 AM

Here's something interesting: QT 7 is taking up less CPU in Tiger than earlier when I still had Panther running. Go figure...

moodymonster · Apr 30, 2005, 05:36 AM

spotlight indexing your files - check the spotlight box and it'll tell when its finished. I imagine it'll use the 'nice' processing - ie cycles not used by anthing else, it has below lowest prioty in CPU usage.

rm199 · Apr 30, 2005, 05:51 AM

I read on the centerstage media centre website that people are playing the 720p versions fine on their 1.42 minis. Not sure which minis they have as both of mine struggle seriously to play 720p in quicktime 7 or VLC. They 'play' but at roughly 50-60% of the FPS. My 1.5 powerbook can play if everything else is closed first but definitely not the 1080 versions.

A little disappointing when my business partners 'cheap' and not exactly new centrino plays 1080 without hiccup.

Dual 2ghz just appeared in the house though so now i can show him 1080 playing AND working at the same time

Assume that once coreimage units get made to help with the h264 decoding then we might be in with a chance for the G4s

f1000 · Apr 30, 2005, 06:46 AM

Originally Posted by Anubis IV

I just found it to be a CPU hog. I literally had to quit EVERY application that was running (including the Finder, though I'm not sure if that was or wasn't a bit of overkill) to get the HD movie trailers to run without dropping frames on my 800MHz G4 TiPB.

I guarantee that your TiPB is still dropping frames. Even my 1GHz G4 12" PB can't do much better than 2 fps playing back a 1080p stream.

scottiB · 10:57 AM

QT 7 w/Panther - DP800/G4

Kingdom of Heaven trailer, 1280 x 544, 24fps

Maxed at 12 fps and my CPU usage for QT was hovering around 125%

...but it looked fantastic!!!!!1!1!11.

Looks like a G5 purchase will be sooner rather than later....

edit:

On the 1080 clips, I was struggling at 5 fps with the CPUs touching 150% now and then.

d0ubled0wn · Apr 30, 2005, 11:17 AM

Originally Posted by scottiB

QT 7 w/Panther - DP800/G4

Kingdom of Heaven trailer, 1280 x 544, 24fps

Maxed at 12 fps and my CPU usage for QT was hovering around 125%

...but it looked fantastic!!!!!1!1!11.

Looks like a G5 purchase will be sooner rather than later....

Yes. Watching movie trailers is a great reason to upgrade to a G5.