MKV & G4

[waynestewart]

I used to use a G4 MDD to run videos on an LCD TV but I ran into trouble with MKV files. I was using a 1.33ghz DP MDD with 2gb RAM, Ati 9000 pro video card and a 320gb SATA HD with card. It would skip the odd frame when playing MKV files.

I have a G4 DA with a Sonnet DP 1.8ghz processor, maxed RAM, 128 gb 7200 rpm drive. It skipped quite a few frames when playing MKV files. It came with a flashed 9200 video card. I tried a few other video cards GeForce4 Ti, 8500, and Mac 9000 pro. The 9000 pro seemed to have fewer skipped frames than the others . I tried moving the SATA & card over and booting off it but that didn't seem to help. It plays MKV files about equally with the MDD. I tried with OS 10.4 but the latest version of VLC for that skipped a lot of frames. With 10.5 and a later version of VLC things improved. I also shut off unnecessary processes like spotlight indexing.

I think that likely getting a dual 1.42 processor for the MDD might let it play without skipped frames. I'd like to use the DA for this but unless a better video card would make a difference, I can't see what else to do at this point. I'm using a Macbook Pro for video right now but I'd just rather use a G4 in this instance if I could.

 

[johnklos]

MKV is about as vague as QuickTime - it all depends on the contents of the file. If you're ripping Blu-Ray and expect a G4 to play 1920x1080 MKV files at full framerate, good luck. On the other hand, any of the machines you're mentioning should play standard definition just fine.

One suggestion is to transcode (using Handbrake or the like) to a QuickTime format. VLC is a great program, but it's not as optimized for either Altivec or using the video hardware as is QuickTime in OS X, so try that. You can even open many kinds of MKV files in QuickTime directly using Perian, for instance, and while you do often need to wait until the entire file has been scanned before it'll play nicely, depending on the kind of video it'll often play with less CPU.

 

[waynestewart]

I just did a check and the MKV files I'm trying to play are 1280 x720.

I’ve installed Perian with all my OSX Macs and I had tried QuickTime but it wouldn't play any MKV file that I have. Today I had a thought that the only place I'd tried it was on a couple of 10.6 machines which often have two versions of QuickTime. On investigating I realized that the QuickTime I'd been trying was 10. I tried QuickTime 7 and it worked. Only downside was that on the DA I had to wait for the whole MKV file to load which took a while. Maybe I’ll have to RAID a couple of drives or consider a small SSD.

I could convert to a QuickTime format which works well, even at 1920 x 1080 but

I’m trying to work with the files I have. Some things will never work though. The MTS files that come off my 1080 camcorder are one. Couldn’t really play those with a 2 ghz Core Duo I had.

 

[phreakout]

It looks like MKV (aka Matroska file format) is supported on most video playback apps, it's just that MKV is not efficient or less of a resource hog; at least in my observation. And I'm surprised that the G4 is handling the load well. I would have thought that it was going to choke under the pressure. I just wouldn't try to play the file back on anything less than a G4. If you have other software that can support it, you could convert MKV into say an MPEG 4 or something more efficient.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 

[waynestewart]

Still trying to play those MKV files with VLC. Perian worked but I got impatient waiting for it to load.

I tried using Disk Utility to RAID a couple of hard drives. If it made a difference it was pretty minute though I did notice a difference in write speeds. Xbench confirmed it.

I picked up a 1.42 ghz MDD today. That helped a some. Only noticed a couple of skipped frames every minute. I guess I'll try overclocking it to 1.5 ghz and see if I can get rid of those last couple of skipped frames.