[vlc] Re: Hardware acceleration under OS X

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

On woensdag, apr 23, 2003, at 12:33 Europe/Amsterdam, Godefroy Troude 
wrote:
> Hello and thanks for your DVD player !
>
> I read in your FAQ: "3.1.1. Does VLC support the ATI DVD hardware
> acceleration cards? -> Currently it does not. We would be glad to 
> support
> them, but we lack technical information on them."
>
> Is hardware acceleration supported with new PowerBooks with Nvidia 
> cards ?
> In example 12 and 17 inches PowerBooks ? I'm planning to buy a new
> Powerbook or iBook and hardware acceleration in VLC will be a big 
> element of
> my choice ! OS X Apple DVD player is really uggly with many DVD (OS 9 
> was
> better).
>
> Best regards.

The OS takes care of graphics acceleration. We just give the OS our 
graphics and it displays it.
The OS takes advantage of many of the hardware accelerations the 
graphics cards supply.

With the old Powerbooks, there was a problem that the CPU couldn't 
DECODE the DVD fast enough. It therefore had an extra DVD decoder card. 
This card was used by DVD player <= 2.0
Since OSX was released, apple dropped support for this particular card, 
with that making that old Powerbook once again incapable of watching 
DVD's. You are talking about way faster computers, which are probably 
about 4-6 times as fast as the Powerbook discussed in the FAQ. The new 
Macs don't need such a card, because they can handle decoding all by 
itself (and do something in the background at the same time ;).

Just remember that a G4  1Ghz is always faster then a G3 1Ghz CPU.
The Graphics Cards are less important then you make them out to be. 
When you want to run all the latest games, then you need to take a look 
at what kind of graphicscard you want.

DJ
---
Videolan - VLC media player
Derk-Jan Hartman (thedj at users.sourceforge.net)
Co-Developer of the MacOS X port of vlc
http://www.videolan.org/vlc

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