# QT and 10.1 major speed problems



## buggs1a (Oct 1, 2001)

10.1. QT pro. 502. Play mpeg file. When using mouse to browse through file menu or other menues in quicktime it is extremly slow and un responsive. like a really slow computer. like finder resizing was in 10.0.
using the mouse to click on any of the menues like file, edit, movie, window, etc, the computer has to catch up to the mouse, just like finder resize was in 10.0. it is freaking horribly slow.
dual g4/450 with 896mb ram.


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## RodriC02000 (Oct 1, 2001)

QT performs extremely well for me on 10.1

It actually performs flawlessly, no lag at all.

and I am using an iBook (Dual USB) with 384 MB of RAM..

DVD is great too  

Maybe there is a problem with your installation????!?!?!?!?!?


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## buggs1a (Oct 1, 2001)

no problem with install, have installed 5 times.


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## RodriC02000 (Oct 1, 2001)

Then I have no clue what could be wrong, it might be a bug in 10.1 with your hardware........

That must really suck!!!

Sorry!


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## buggs1a (Oct 1, 2001)

I am doing another install, lol. Only I have the full install cd, this isn't upgrade.

It is a huge sucky problem though. I do clean install - aka format and install. My G4/450 with 896mb ram and QT sucks.  this is a dual G4/450 with gigabit ethernet, super drive and 896mb ram.

Playing any local mpeg file I tried. Use the mouse to like open the file menu or present movie etc, all those menues, even min to dock, move the window itself. holy cow it's horrible. Switch to the finder or other apps the mac is fine. Only the QT app is having a problem.

i went to www.apple.com/macosx/feedback and reported this problem.


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## ink (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by buggs1a _
> *I am doing another install, lol. Only I have the full install cd, this isn't upgrade.
> 
> It is a huge sucky problem though. I do clean install - aka format and install. My G4/450 with 896mb ram and QT sucks.  this is a dual G4/450 with gigabit ethernet, super drive and 896mb ram.
> *


 
 
QuickTime just plain sucks under OSX.  Download the 'fullscreen' trailer for Fellowship of the Rings from quicktime.com (30mb).  Play the movie in OS9, it plays from scratch without a single hiccup (dual USB iBook with 384mb of RAM).  Boot into 10.1 and watch the same exact movie; it drops frames like a burning barn. 
 
I don't understand how the DVD player can be so incredible under OSX, and QuickTime so horrible.  The DVD player is 10 times better than the OS9 DVD player. 
 
Oh well.  If you really want some entertainment, try to watch the Fellowship of the Rings fullscreen trailer under 10.0.4; on my machine I think it showed about 10 frames *total*.  So, I suppose it's getting better...


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## sukram (Oct 1, 2001)

buggs,

if you get a response from apple please post it.  i have the same system and am going to buy 10.1 later this week...  i have a feeling that learning to problem solve in os x will be a pain to do (since its completely different from os<=9) but somehow should solve this...  thanks

sukram


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## buggs1a (Oct 1, 2001)

re install no good. lolol. it is offical, QT sucks in 10.l1.


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## RodriC02000 (Oct 1, 2001)

I downloaded the exact same trailer on my IceBook and it played Flawlessly. i could  even drag the window and not loose many frames...

Am I just lucky?


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## Makosuke (Oct 1, 2001)

I'm a bit confused that it hasn't been mentioned more, but the problem with MPEG video has existed since 10.0.0 on my machine, and is still there in 10.1--I'm pretty sure that it's related to QT, not the OS itself.  At least in my case, though, (and I have a DP533, so I'll admit I'm throwing a heckuva lotta power at it) QT for X handles almost all other (non-MPEG1 mutexed, that is) media just fine--even Sorenson video, which is much more processor intensive, works far better than MPEG.  The LotR fullscreen trailer played fine (even dragging) for me, I can play three quarter screen (320X240) Sorenson compressed trailers simultaneously (along with a couple of MP3s) with no dropped frames and no significant slowdown, and I can play at least 15 MP3s simultaneously (yes, it's useless, I was just curious) without any of the tracks in the cacophony skipping, and without maxing out the processors.

Basically, MPEG1 video is the only thing that causes problems--even MPEG2 must be ok, or DVDs (which as poor hardware-decoder owners have discovered are software decoded) wouldn't work well.  I'm betting that the people here who don't see any problem haven't messed around with large-frame MPEG...

The one thing I've never been quite clear on is whether this is a universal problem--I've heard several other reports of it (and at least one was from a single processor Mac owner, so it's not just a DP issue), but not as many as I would have expected if it's universal (then again, maybe not that many people use MPEG video now).  Has anybody definitely played an MPEG video clip (little ones don't count--at least 320X240) without using up most of the available processor power and slowing QT player to a crawl?

And, of course, if you have, what're you doing differently?


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by buggs1a _
> *re install no good. lolol. it is offical, QT sucks in 10.l1. *


I have the exact same system except with more ram, and I have the problem you describe, but I don't think it's a biggie.. I'm playing my mpeg movie of an nfs share, and yes, while in quicktime the menus are a bit slow, but I think it's fine cause how often do you have a movie playing and you're doing other work in quicktime player? Usually I only go in the menus to "present movie." The movie itself is going full rate with no hiccups. Super.

and I can play the lord of the rings trailer no problem. I don't see the issues people have with qt under 10.1.. it's miles better than qt under 10.0, that's for sure. There's still a problem with fullscreen wide angle qt movies under a dual-monitor setup, but..

dp450/1.4gig/dvd-rom
-o


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## Captain Code (Oct 1, 2001)

I noticed that it seems that all of the people having problems with QT in 10.X are using dual processor systems.  Might this be a bug in QT?


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## ink (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by RodriC02000 _
> *I downloaded the exact same trailer on my IceBook and it played Flawlessly. i could  even drag the window and not loose many frames...
> 
> Am I just lucky?
> ...



No, you didn't get the right movie.  If you had downloaded the correct movie, you wouldn't be able to drag it around, because it is displayed on the screen with custom top and bottom graphics.  Try again -- I promise, it will skip frames and even drop out for seconds at a time.   There is no such problem under OS9.

Not that I care   I hate QuickTime anyway, so I can just add this to the list of things I hate about it (right behind theclosed-Sorensen codecs, but in front of the ugly windows and why-not-go-pro-? nagware and the lack of on-screen options).  It's just strange that Apple did such a good job with the DVD player and such a horrible job on QuickTime.


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by ink _
> *
> 
> No, you didn't get the right movie.  If you had downloaded the correct movie, you wouldn't be able to drag it around, because it is displayed on the screen with custom top and bottom graphics.  Try again -- I promise, it will skip frames and even drop out for seconds at a time.   There is no such problem under OS9.
> ...


dude I just tried again, no problem. I can drag the window around (it only plays fullscreen when first opened, after you hit esc it's in a window).

and it sounds like your beef is with the qt player, not necessarily qt.. qt rocks, which is why it is now the reference standard for mpeg4 (fileformat, drm, etc). Just sport the $20 for the pro version and you'll be duly impressed. Or just go download a freeware qt player which gives you fullscreen. Or how about windows media player?


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## justinkim (Oct 1, 2001)

FWIW, on my G4/400 (single processor) w/256 meg RAM, playing a 320x200 DiVX encoded movie takes up between 30 and 50% of my processor and plays very smoothly.

Contrast this with the DVD player which takes about 50-60% of my processor for a much higher quality movie.  I freely admit that I don't know enough to draw any conclusions from this.  the DiVX codec is pretty new, so might not be as optimized as it might be.  Comparing DVD playback to DiVX playback might also not be a valid comparison.  Still, it's interesting.


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## ink (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by soellman _
> *
> dude I just tried again, no problem. I can drag the window around (it only plays fullscreen when first opened, after you hit esc it's in a window).*



Try playing it in full screen then.


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## jove (Oct 1, 2001)

As soon as I start moving the mouse around QT stalls. Frames skipped and the menu fade was like in slo-mo. 

I have a theory. QT is a complex enough system where porting 60 percent of the Classic OS to Windows (memory management, Quickdraw, and etc...) was an easier task than porting QT itself. QT made writing cross-platform code easier  Carbon...

Carbon, as most of us know, is a port of 95 percent of the Classic OS APIs to X. Unfortuantely a good carbonization is more than just recompiling. Classic and carbon handle events (key click, mouse move, and etc) very differently. Classic applications are always asking for events in a tight loop. The OS gives them everything including NULL events just to keep the loop moving. All events are then filtered and propagated by the application. This takes gobs of processor time in a noncooperative multitasking environment.

The carbon event model has events being passed to the destination object directly throug call backs. The appliactions do not have tight event loops. They do not do the filtering and propagation. This is much more efficient. QT...

Apple may have decided not to alter X QT because of the obvious common code between OS9, Windows, and now X. Unfortuanately we are probably seeing the consequences as the player is receiving and processing every little mouse moved event.

This is just a theory.


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by ink _
> *
> 
> Try playing it in full screen then. *


sure, why? it plays just fine fullscreen, while I have itunes doing visualizations in the other monitor. no slowdown whatsoever in qt, although the itunes vis has a pretty slow framerate 

works like a champ.


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by jove _
> *As soon as I start moving the mouse around QT stalls. Frames skipped and the menu fade was like in slo-mo.
> 
> Apple may have decided not to alter X QT because of the obvious common code between OS9, Windows, and now X. Unfortuanately we are probably seeing the consequences as the player is receiving and processing every little mouse moved event.
> ...


I think you're right on the money. It might actually perform better at playback using the cooperative threading model (when there are no other events) because it can grab more of the cpu slice given it by the preemptive scheduler.. but I'm not sure how carbonized it is, I forget how to check (like if it's a pef or mach-o binary), it's all speculation at this point.


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## Makosuke (Oct 1, 2001)

I'm going to have to partially disagree with the porting theory; I do think it has to do with a "get it working" port, but since the problem is just with the MPEG decoder, I'm a bit skeptical that it has much to do with threading issues.

I just did a couple of minutes worth of testing, and I have to correct the numbers I gave before--it's actually faster under 10.1.  I just played the 640X340 Sorenson 3 fullscreen Lord of the Rings trailer in a window (and yes, as soon as you drop it out of presentation mode you certainly can play it in a window), two copies of the Sorenson 1 Final Fantasy 480X260 trailer, and a copy of the older Fellowship of the Ring Sorenson 1 480X204 trailer.  After spreading them over two hard drives (they're slow IDE drives) I had all four playing, at the same time, with the entire frames visible (big monitor), and they were all smooth as glass.  The processors were about topped off acording to CPU Meter, but I could even drag one around in little circles and the others didn't skip (it did, of course, but the draggin was still smooth).  Switching to IE or dropping down a menu over one of them didn't cause any skipping either (although launching the Word demo did).  In fact, I'm typing this now with them cruising along in the background.

Point is, even the rather demanding Sorenson/Sorenson 3 codecs--far more demanding than MPEG1 (I couldn't even come close to playing one of these on my old 6500 but it would handle MPEG well enough)--play spectacularly in QT under X.  Issues with the *player* aside, I'm not even going to try and argue the plethora of merits of QuickTime and its architecture, but (in addition to a bit of CPU-bragging) I'd say this illustrates that the fault lies not with the Quicktime Player or the fundamentals of QT's construction--it's just a simple problem with optimizing the MPEG decoder.

(Oh, and by the way:  A quarter-frame divx clip uses around 30% of my CPUs, and the reason that seems unbalanced if you compare it to DVD decoding is that divx is just a more demanding video format--the quality is theoretically similar, but the files are much smaller.  That means the processor has to do more work to turn the data back into an image.)


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## daveyohill (Oct 1, 2001)

Just finished upgrading to 10.1 and am very impressed. Apps launch easily twice as fast and QT runs fine. I could not watch the full screen version of the Lord of the Rings trailer under OSX before. After checking this thred out I fired it up, while playing iTunes and it is marvelous. No out of sync audio or jerky video.

I'm happy with OS X 10.1

G4 400 AGP, 512MB RAM.

DOH


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by Makosuke _
> *I'm going to have to partially disagree with the porting theory; I do think it has to do with a "get it working" port, but since the problem is just with the MPEG decoder, I'm a bit skeptical that it has much to do with threading issues.*


heh.. I actually did a bit more testing and I'm now more convinced it's a threading issue 

I opened the tomb raider sorensen trailer and a 3ivx movie. started one, tried the menus. pretty fast, but still not up to the non-qt player standard. I started the other as well, and the menus are slower. If at this point you switch to another app, bingo, the menus are fast again.

If the qt player was a modern carbon app with threading being done by the mach kernel, then we'd see no slowdown whatsoever. But since the threading is done by the old event model, it's managed by the cooperative process of the player. So the more cpu action required by the movie playing, the less available to do the menu routines.

but some programmer check me, I'm a bit rusty on my osx internals..


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## soellman (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by Makosuke _
> *I'm going to have to partially disagree with the porting theory; I do think it has to do with a "get it working" port, but since the problem is just with the MPEG decoder, I'm a bit skeptical that it has much to do with threading issues.*


although yes, I agree that the mpeg decoder could use some more optimization


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## ink (Oct 1, 2001)

> _Originally posted by soellman _
> *
> sure, why? it plays just fine fullscreen, while I have itunes doing visualizations in the other monitor. no slowdown whatsoever in qt, although the itunes vis has a pretty slow framerate
> 
> works like a champ. *


You're obviously not using a 500mhz G3 then.  If I hit 'esc' (thanks for the tip, BTW) Quicktime takes about 10 seconds of stuttering before its visible in the window.  If I grab the window and drag it around, the movie pretty much stops playing, although the audio never skips.  It's pretty horrible.

Playing both FotR and Harry Potter at the same time was a joke, neither one worked very well at all.   This system has 384mb of RAM (ibook dual/USB), and the only other open applications are CPU Monitor and Mozilla.


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## buggs1a (Oct 2, 2001)

I downloaded the largest file size of the lord rings file. not full screen. it played ok and when i move the window while it plays it was much better. but when i play local mpeg files and try to move the mouse in the file menues etc it is slow to respond. also the files are from the news groups. QT player is the issue yes.

Also, does anyone know when mac os 10 and QT will be able to play all the avi and mpeg files windows can play? i have tons of avi and divx etc and mac won't play them nativly at all.


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## Makosuke (Oct 2, 2001)

> Also, does anyone know when mac os 10 and QT will be able to play all the avi and mpeg files windows can play? i have tons of avi and divx etc and mac won't play them nativly at all.



X can already play all those divx videos (as well as the related 3vix codec) via a handy freeware plug in available from http://divx.jamby.net/

Just drop it in the QT folder and boom!  System-wide, native divx from within any QT-aware app--not even a restart necessary.  For all the months of work on the Classic MacOS divx project, it never even approached that.  Still a few sound issues, but all in all, very cool, and under active development.

As for the rest of the formats covered under the .avi label, you've mainly got Indeo 3.2, 4, and (most popular) 5, plus i263 and a couple of very old MS codecs.  The old ones are obsolete, and you can (via plug ins available from Intel) play the Indeo codecs through classic.  Intel apparently sold the codecs to another company, though, and I have no idea what their port plans are.  On the bright side, I'd say the majority of new .avi media is divx compressed.  Oh, and that i263 codec was a slightly modified (just enough to make it proprietary) version of the standard h263 streaming video codec, and there never was a Mac version of it.

As for windows only MPEG videos, are you thinking of MS's MP42 codec?  MS Media player will probably pick that up in the future, or (when they finalize MPEG4) it'll be included in Quicktime... I think.  That whole scene has always confused me.



> heh.. I actually did a bit more testing and I'm now more convinced it's a threading issue
> 
> I opened the tomb raider sorensen trailer and a 3ivx movie. started one, tried the menus. pretty fast, but still not up to the non-qt player standard. I started the other as well, and the menus are slower. If at this point you switch to another app, bingo, the menus are fast again.



Hm... very good point.  This isn't my strongest area, so you may well be absolutely right, although when I tried the same thing it worked a bit differently--QT player's menus did slow a bit with a load of (non-MPEG) movies playing, but not much, and although they were a tad snappier in another app, the movies skipped.  That is, it seems like, when QT player is in the front, it gives horespower priority to videos, even if it slows down the menus.  When it's in the background, the foreground process takes some more CPU (as it should), which makes it faster but causes the movies to skip.  Sounds like the way I'd want my scheduling to work... but of course, maybe I'm completely misinterpreting this, and even if I'm right QT Player's behavior might still be due to non-modern threading rather than intentional planning.

In any case, though, the point I was originally trying to make was not that QT player was or wasn't a well behaved X app, but that the main problem with unresponsive menus and poor performance has more to do with the MPEG decoder than threading one way or another.  Who knows, maybe the bum MPEG decoder eats up all the (few?) threads that Player has available, and that's why its so unresponsive...

But again, my knowledge of the subject is shaky enough that I could be entirely wrong on all this...


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## soellman (Oct 2, 2001)

> _Originally posted by ink _
> *
> You're obviously not using a 500mhz G3 then.  If I hit 'esc' (thanks for the tip, BTW) Quicktime takes about 10 seconds of stuttering before its visible in the window.  If I grab the window and drag it around, the movie pretty much stops playing, although the audio never skips.  It's pretty horrible.
> *


No, no I'm not 

Performance-wise, I can't tell if there's a problem, but that's because I've got a more modern system (dp450/1.4gig ram).. I hadn't tried it with a g3/500!

And as far as divx avi's go, we can play them with the jamby codec, but sounds is still screwy because of a quicktime bug. I think it's that qt can't read certain kinds of mp3 encoding out of avi files. But that is a known bug by apple, and should be fixed in one of the 10.1.x updates I'm assuming. And there's still plenty of altivec optimization that can happen in ffmpeg (the engine inside the jamby codec) so it should work better in older machines (again, not something that I see).


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## Ricky (Oct 2, 2001)

I have an iMac and it works fine!  AND HERE'S WHY:

I have my monitor set on thousands (not millions) of colors and the screen res. is at 1024x768.  My thinking is that your G4 is set at millions (doesnt' really look different if you're in thousands but the speed is a hellofalot faster) of colors at 1600x1200 resolution.  Is my thinking partially correct?


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## theed (Oct 2, 2001)

Maybe you have too much RAM?  ;-)  I have a ... check my sig ... with 320M RAM and my main display is a Radeon and my other display XClaim VR 128, both at millions of colors.  It takes up both processors in full on the 128, and about 3/4ths that on the radeon.  The 30M movie kicks ass, as does my clean install of 10.1

As for your hatred of sorenson, I happen to love sorenson, but that is not an issue with QuickTime, Sorenson is its own company.  They just make one helluva codec.  QT is a killer framework, and it's become pretty happy on Mac, Windows, and Linux now.  I think it needs to become the de facto standard in addition to the MPEG 4 standard.  Granted it'd be making me angry if it didn't play stuff ... what video card are you on?

And finally ... whoever put that movie together kicks ass.  It uses the QT framework to dynamically display its own slider, uses 2 stills with live QT fades so as to keep quality high and reduce codec abuse.  One of the classic problems with low bandwidth (epitomized by cinepak) is dancing pixels.  This is a sweet way to get clean stills without squandering away your bandwidth.  And I can't copy it, good for them, ... maybe I'll slap it full screen onto VHS.    Wonder if they encoded that VCR suck signal into it?  ... nope, they didn't.  Anyone want a copy?  it's analog.  ;-)


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## Makosuke (Oct 2, 2001)

For the heck of it, I just tried the 480 FF Movie trailer and the LotR trailer on an old beige 266 with 10.1.  The LotR trailer had sound, but the video was essentially not moving... but even their stats said at least a G3 300, and Classic was about the same.  (On the other hand, the menus and controls in QuickTime Player were still more responsive than on my DP533 with a MPEG video half that size playing.)  The smaller trailer (still big) played with just a tiny bit of stuttering, and actually dragged surprisingly smoothly--jerky video while dragging, but it was still moving and the window moved smoothly.  Again, the same video played with a little less stuttering in Classic, but all in all, I was impressed with how close the X performance (at least with the Sorenson codec) was in comparison.

On an unrelated note, I forgot to mention something kind of funny:  Try opening an MPEG movie in a Classic version of QT Player and check out the CPU monitor--at least on my box, it pulls probably a third of the CPU power of the same movie in QTX.  There's evidence if I ever saw it.


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## Makosuke (Oct 20, 2001)

Sorry to dredge this thread up, but I just discovered something very interesting (if not useful to anybody but QT developers) about the slow MPEG performance in QTX:  It's the audio's fault.

I happened to be messing around with a demuxing program, and when I played the video stream I noticed that the player was entirely responsive, and the processors were barely even noticing it.  But when i played the audio... boom.  Incredibly sluggish response from QT Player, processors probably 2/3 of max.  And there you have it.

Since MPEG1 layer 3 audio is fine (I think we'd have all noticed if that one wasn't ok), and an MP2 clip I tried worked well too, I guess it's just MPEG1, layer 1 audio that chokes QuickTime.  Of all the things to cause problems...  I guess if you encoded one with MP2 (or MP3, I suppose) audio it'd work ok.

Funny, because I now vaguely remember that classic QuickTime used to have problems with sluggish response on MP2 (not MP1) audio way back before it even supported MP3.  I wonder if this is some vaguely related bug cropping up years later, or just a coincidence.

Anyway, I just had to tell SOMEBODY about my little discovery.


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## soellman (Oct 22, 2001)

nice work!


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## vertigo (Oct 22, 2001)

I'm on a B&W G3/450, and my only complaint with Quicktime is when playing some MPEG files. I can't drag the window or control the volume without clicking and holding for several seconds and even then it's choppy. Native Quicktime (.mov) files play flawlessly and I can drag them around fine. Even DivX and my hacked DVD player work better than MPEG files. Just odd.


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## Makosuke (Oct 22, 2001)

> _Originally posted by vertigo _
> *I'm on a B&W G3/450, and my only complaint with Quicktime is when playing some MPEG files. I can't drag the window or control the volume without clicking and holding for several seconds and even then it's choppy. Native Quicktime (.mov) files play flawlessly and I can drag them around fine. Even DivX and my hacked DVD player work better than MPEG files. Just odd. *


That, vertigo, is exactly the bug we've been talking about for the past dozen or so posts. Although there are some complaints about overall speed, the only real problem is a bug in the MPEG decoder that causes it to suck up way more processor power than it should need, and that's why the windows drag terribly when an MPEG clip is playing.


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