On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 09:20 -0500, vinai wrote: > 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.
Yah, and it's not simple to make it work because you need both to have a driver for that chip, and to have a proper capture/overlay driver for the mach64 as the output of that decoder is a digital video stream (4:2:2 afaik) that is routed to the input of the mach64 chip. > 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 > > -- Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
