[vlc] Re: Does VLC work without internal DVD Drive in iMac ?

[Felix Kühne]

Hello Philip and Anne.

> G3 iMac's don't have USB-2.0 (Apple introduced USB 2.0 rather late).  
> So eventhough you plug in a USB-2 DVD drive, it will only work at 
> USB-1 speeds which may be too slow for DVD playback on an iMac?  (In 
> theory, 12Mbps USB should be fast enough, but I'm not sure if it's 
> true in your case.)
Well, I thought that you were using a G3-iMac with Firewire-ports (same 
as I do btw.), which can transport 400 Mbit/s, which really sufficient 
for playing DVDs or even using mid-class hard-disks.

> Also, I've been playing with optimizing MPEG-2 playback on MacOS-X.  
> For some reason, the Quicktime engine does not use hardware 
> acceleration (eventhough on OS-9 it does).  But, if you use OpenGL as 
> your video-out method, it flies.
It's unsure whether OpenGL-output is available on your iMac. If you 
have 16 MB Video-RAM (has nothing to do with ordinary RAM, it's an 
extra chip on the graphics card) it is, if you haven't it's not. If the 
latter one is true, you should neither use Post-Processing nor 
Deinterlacing, since your iMac won't be fast enough to decode the DVD 
then.

> BTW- Some good news is that Tiger (10.4) is supposed to increase the 
> use of hardware acceleration of Quicktime codecs.  Has anyone tried 
> VLC on a Tiger pre-release?
Nope, but this won't help actually, since VLC uses internal codecs and 
no QuickTime-ones. Support of CoreVideo (which is the official name for 
the acceleration you are talking about) isn't planned afaik and would 
require at least G4-macs with Quartz Extreme support.

Kind regards,
Felix

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