Firefox 5 not on Tiger PowerPC :(

[PowerPup]

Ah okay, knew there was a reason. Guess I missed the parts in your blog where you mentioned you were looking into it.

I did a bit of searching, looks like there was plans during Google's Summer of Code 2007 to add see2 and altivec into libtheora. But I haven't found anything from that.

I did however find this in FFmpeg's mailing list:

16% faster theora decode on a G4.

[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Altivec VP3 IDCT

http://gitorious.org/~astrange/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-mt/blobs/master/libavcodec/ppc/vp3dsp_altivec.c

But it's part of the Libav library so I don't know if it's possible to implement this.

There appears to be Altivec YCbCr->RGB conversion in the liboggplay library: http://git.xiph.org/?p=liboggplay.git;a=commitdiff;h=1228bebc7f21f0b6c7014b475c96e792fee2a362

But it's commented out:

//altivec intristics only working with -maltivec gcc flag, //but we want runtime altivec detection, hence this has to be

//fixed!

//#include "oggplay_yuv2rgb_altivec.c"

Looks like it would take a bit of scissors and glue. That is if anything I found is useful. Oh well. I'm in no hurry, even if it never gets built into the browser, I can always download and then watch it. And yeah, Webm is looking pretty good. Although at this moment Theora still plays smoother on my PowerBook G4. (at least, out of browser it does, need to do a comparison within TFF.)

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Out of browser, Theora probably does win; VP3 is computationally less complex than VP8, and there's no browser content or chrome to composit against, so it just blits to video memory.

At least in 10.4Fx, WebM has an accelerated pathway for decoding and rendering, but out of browser it would purely be a function of codec, and VP3 definitely wins.

Also, I should note that the library in Firefox 4/5 is different from the old one in 3.6, which uses the code you mention.

 

[highlandcattle]

Thanks For FF5 )

 

[Anonymous Freak]

umm wait, where was i. Firefox 5? i thought 4 was just released.

And it's worse than you think... FF4 has also been declared "End of Life" which means it won't get any security updates.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, which I don't fully understand -- I would have thought they would have done a 4.0.2 as a rollup, but they didn't.

I did push out a 4.0.3 as a rollup and while most people are going on to 10.4Fx 5, a minority of users are going for 4.0.3 instead, so there is clearly some demand probably caused by semi-popular extensions that just aren't getting love from their maintainers.

I'm getting heat for my anti-plugin crusade which seems to consist entirely of "waaah I won't be able to watch Flash videos" -- never mind trying to get code that isn't mine to cooperate with code that is rapidly evolving, nor the security or maintainability aspects. Scream at Adobe, not me. Geez.

MacTubes does a much better job anyway as a video player.

 

[PowerPup]

Flash only does well at low resolutions anyway, unless you've got a 1Ghz+ G4 or a G5. Besides, they'll be able to watch Webm easily enough. Especially after your optimizations are complete. With Flash 10.1 being the last version for PPC, it might not be long before sites move to requiring 10.3 minimum.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Many sites already are, in fact. TenFourFox is perfectly capable of playing Chrome Angry Birds ... except that it uses Flash 10.3 for the sound. Wtf?