Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Leonis · Mar 1, 2006, 08:49 PM

My 3 years old G3 900MHz iBook (640MB RAM is in) still functions but it does choke when playing 640x480 and 720x480 video files at full frame.

I maybe using wrong codec (hence the high data rate) that makes the hard drive and CPU unable keep out.

It's not a wise (to me) to spend another 2K just to get a faster laptop to do presentation.

So...I am wonder what codec I should use and the maximum data rate I should set so that I can at least do presentation (animation) with decent quality. Tried using DV but it's really bad for presenting animation.

mduell · Mar 2, 2006, 10:08 PM

Have you tried MPEG2 at 640x480 at about 9600kbps?

tooki · Mar 3, 2006, 03:22 AM

I'd try Sorenson video if MPEG/MPEG-2 proves to be too CPU-intensive, or for animation with lots of flat surfaces, use the Animation codec. Bear in mind that QuickTime cannot encode or play MPEG-2 without purchasing an extra component.

tooki

Leonis · Mar 3, 2006, 01:23 PM

Animation codec is no no since its data rate is outrageously high (48MB/sec and sometimes almost 70MB). Even G5's SATA drives sometimes can't keep up.

f1000 · Mar 3, 2006, 01:42 PM

Originally Posted by Leonis

So...I am wonder what codec I should use and the maximum data rate I should set so that I can at least do presentation (animation) with decent quality. Tried using DV but it's really bad for presenting animation.

Try using ffmpegX to convert the file into DVD format, since DVD Player can take advantage of hardware acceleration on many Macs.

pat++ · Mar 4, 2006, 03:13 PM

The fastest codec available for divx/3ivx is 3ivx.com :

http://www.3ivx.com/download/macos.html

it's much much much faster than Apple's codec to play MPEG-4 video as well.

Tuoder · Mar 6, 2006, 03:21 PM

on my G3 iMac DV I put the quicktime file in a ramdisk. That seems to help. I don't know why. There could be a hard disk bottleneck there, given that it is an iBook (laptop HDDs have a tendency to suck). Download Esperance DV - 2.3 if you have Mac OSX (and I think that you do).
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20947

SSharon · Mar 6, 2006, 04:09 PM

I have found that even for the same video VLC uses less resources in full screen than QT does. I am assuming that they are using the same codecs as well, but I'm not really sure since I think I have downloaded every one out there and don't know how to check which one is being used at the moment.
Bottom line. Have you tried VLC?

Tuoder · Mar 6, 2006, 11:31 PM

Originally Posted by SSharon

I have found that even for the same video VLC uses less resources in full screen than QT does. I am assuming that they are using the same codecs as well, but I'm not really sure since I think I have downloaded every one out there and don't know how to check which one is being used at the moment.
Bottom line. Have you tried VLC?

I use VLC, too, and I have also had better luck with it. I don't know why I didn't mention it before.

Leonis · Mar 8, 2006, 01:06 AM

After a few days of trial I am pretty confident to say I HAVE to use 3ivx to compress the file down to 640x480 at 1500kbps data rate. Then use VLC to do the playback. QT player takes 100% of CPU power while VLC uses 40%.

I find it so hard to believe QT player is a resource hog.

If I am doing a very serious presentation I will use DVD Studio Pro to compress the file into VIDEO_TS files and let it play with the software DVD player