# Upgrading a G4 Powermac for HD video



## fernandos1 (Jul 18, 2007)

Hi, I have an Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.25 DP (FW 800) (M8840LL/A). I added 2GB of Ram and it has the standard 4X AGP ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card with 64 MB of DDR SDRAM.

When I go to iMovie to transfer HD video from my video camera, iMovie can handle but it captures the video at a slower speed usually 50% or less. Sometimes it freezes altogether if it is a long clip I am trying to capture.

So here's my questions:
1) Since my RAM is maxed out, would getting an upgraded video card solve my problem or do I need to upgrade the computer?
2) If the solution is to get a new video card, what do you recommend? I have a 23" Apple Display with the ADC connector.

Thank you so much.


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## MisterMe (Jul 19, 2007)

fernandos1 said:


> ....
> 
> When I go to iMovie ...


If you want to do HD, then you need *iMovie HD*. Which version of *iMovie* do you have?


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## Kees Buijs (Jul 19, 2007)

fernandos1 said:


> Hi, I have an Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.25 DP (FW 800) (M8840LL/A). I added 2GB of Ram and it has the standard 4X AGP ATI Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card with 64 MB of DDR SDRAM..



How is your harddrive. Has it enough space and is it fast enough ? When memory available for capturing is full, data will be moved to the harddrive and possible it fails when accessing the harddrive, so check your harddrive for maybe bad errors.


Good luck, Kees


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## fernandos1 (Jul 19, 2007)

I am using iMovie HD. I have a 160Gb hard drive that is half full. I noticed that yesterday I was editing some RAW picture files in Lightroom and it was pretty slow as well. Would a better graphics card help in any way?


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## Jeffo (Jul 20, 2007)

I would imagine that the better graphics card would help with lightroom, but the iMovie HD would be more of a main CPU processing issue.  I have a dual G4/867 with 2gig of ram and about 700gig of drives in it, two of which are stripped together and it has a real hard time with HD material, especially with the H.264 codec.  And I upgraded the video card to an ATI Radeon 9600 with 256mb of vram.


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## Tronman (Jul 30, 2007)

I have a Quicksilver with nVidia GF6200 graphics, 512MB RAM and a 1.52GHz Gigadesigns G4 single CPU.  It can't play HD video, and I'm bummed.  On the PeeCee side there are all sorts of hardware tweaking utilities but I don't know of any for the Mac.  It seems like 1.5Ghz of G4 could play HD video-a 1GHz G4 in a Pegasos II can do it, if that's all it's doing.  And that's with a slower Radeon 9000 card at that.

Is there any sort of control panel for nVidia cards that you can get?

I have twin 500GB Hitachi SATA drives in soft RAID configuration on a Macsense eSATA card, playing the movie from there is just as bad.  VLC seems even slower than Quicktime, I tried Quartz and OpenGL video output options in VLC, no difference.  Even doing greyscale didn't help.

Can a dual G5 do HD video?


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## Tronman (Aug 8, 2007)

Update:  My Mac can do 720p HD video, I removed the 2x256meg RAM that the Mac was seeing as PC100 (even tho it is Micron PC133 2-2-2 on the label) and put in one 512MB stick of PC1333 3-3-3 RAM from Ramdirect.com.  Curiously, although my 'system' memory test in Xbench was faster, the 'stream' test numbers were all lower, by 40 megabytes at times.  Despite this, 720p video now plays smoothly so I guess my ole' G4 can somewhat do HD


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## mdnky (Aug 8, 2007)

Your processor is the culprit.  HD video, particulary H.264 encoded video, requires a huge amount of processing power just to play.  

I had the last G4 Powerbook made (1.67gHz, 2GB DDR2 matched pair, ATI 256MB video) and could barely do 720p at native size without skipping and other issues.  Same issue on a MDD with dual 1.42gHz G4s.  The MBPro I have now has no issues at all.

Might be a good time to consider an upgrade if you're going to be messing with a lot of HD content.  The new iMacs (and the Minis for that matter) will handle it with no problems.  G4s like yours are still fetching around $650 to $800 on eBay last I saw.



Apple's official recommendation for 720p HD in Quicktime 7 is:

1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer; 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster
At least 256MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card

Your current maschine only meets the requirement for 480p playback.

Apple's official recommendation for 480p HD in Quicktime 7 is:

1.25 GHz PowerMac G4 or faster Macintosh computer
At least 128MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card


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## Tronman (Aug 8, 2007)

Well I did kinda know I was getting lucky just to be able to watch 720p on this machine, and it does look real good.  However nVidia mentions on their spec sheet that the 6200 series cards have hardware acceleration for HD video, so I kinda wonder if the Mac is taking advantage of that.  I am currently unaware of any way to tell.  The other thing is my lame display-if I had a big LCD then the system wouldn't have to scale the video down, saving a chunk of CPU power right there.

There are available various PCI card solutions to hardware decode HD video, just like the salad days of 2000 ;-) when many PCs couldn't play DVD movies without a hardware decoder card.  Is anyone here familiar with such cards, or tried one with the Mac?  It seems the bottleneck is the actual decoding, the AGP4x slot is more than capable of moving the video to the display once it's decoded.  I'll do some research.


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