Re: apple dvd pccard
On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Dean Hamstead wrote:
sadly the mpeg decoder on the ati cards in imac dv's
(and my ibook dual usb) are unsupported
thats the sole reason my old imac dv runs osx
man id be willing to throw cash at someone to
reverse engineer it. pity ben is a busy man as
it is. someone clone him.
Well, that's a little bit of a different situation. On the older Mac
Powerbooks, with 64-bit ATI graphics chips, there was a dedicated
MPEG-2 hardware decoder, either a PCMCIA card, or a chip on the laptop
motherboard. I don't know if the 64-bit chip lacked the horsepower,
or just basicfunctionality, to play MPEG-2 streams at the appropriate
frame rate, but additional hardware was needed.
On your macs, you most likely have at least 128-bit graphics hardware
(the lombard was the last laptop to have 64-bit, and either the old
Beige G3 tower or Blue and White G3 tower was the last desktop to come
with 64-bit). In 128-bit chips and above, MPEG-2 decoding is done in
the video card hardware. I don't think ATI ever published info about
this function for any of their cards, which is why you need a machine
with enough CPU power to decompress DVDs.
However, when I did have my lombard (G3 400), I thought either Xine,
mplayer, or VideoLan (most likely the last one, as that's what I've
been using the most) would play DVDs _JUST_ at the level of
"watchability" (i.e. if there was a lot of rapid action or scene
changes, video would stutter. But for a less variable scene, it'd
be fine). And that was quite a few years ago, on OS X...
Having a G4 helps, as I think the writers of some of these packages
have been able to utilize Altivec to assist with the MPEG-2 decoding.
But this is where things stand (AFAIK ;-)
cheers
vinai
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