--- On Sat, 5/1/10, John Carmonne <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> I'm a little confused as I can't play DVDs on this machine
> in Tiger. I never tried in OS9.2.2. I read a card is in
> order to play the DVD so I was wondering if the VRM was a
> solution to that?
>
> John Carmonne
> Yorba Linda USA
> From Cube 500
Its not just the VRAM, although that does play a part - it is the system CPU
and bus speed as well. The DVD decoder card for OS9 had a special dedicated
processing unit designed specifically to decode DVD MPEG streams, so all the
computer's CPU had to do was feed the MPEG stream to the card, then read the
decoded frames from the card and throw them up onto the screen. The classic
video iPod's have a similar hardware decoder for getting smooth video playback
even though the iPod's processor is much too slow to do real time video
decoding - alternate operating systems like Rockbox cannot access the hardware
decoder and are pretty much unable to playback usable video. On OS X (all
versions) Apple assumes that the CPU and memory bus are fast enough to do this
strictly in software (the 400MHz G3 iMac DV's could barely do it) and so there
is no way to use the hardware decoding device on the card from within OS X. I
think the best bet for using a Wallstreet
as a DVD player is to keep a small OS9 partition on the disc (needed for
XPostFacto anyway) and boot back into OS9 to use the hardware DVD decoder for
playing movies.
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