iBook G4 Graphics Performance

J

JimmyMac2

Registered
I hope this question isn't too redundant, but most of the information I've found online concerning (video) graphics performance on the iBook is like 8 years old.

Can anyone give me a good explanation from a modern-day perspective, of the inconsistent video performance of my iBook (12" G4, 1.07GHz, 1.25GB, Radeon 32MB GPU?) It can play a DVD at full-screen, full sound without missing a beat, but can't play a lo-res YouTube video without stop-motion and clipped audio. I can plug in a USB webcam and do a real-time video chat, but if I record the stream, it plays back at, like, 2fps or less.

I suspect that the GPU isn't to blame, and the 1GHz CPU should be able to keep up. I mean, back in the day, a 600 MHz Pentium could do this. So, where is the logjam, and more importantly, did Apple ever do anything to make it better? I have found that information like firmware/software updates is much harder to come by for the Apple products, especially the older ones. Is this by design?

I have upgraded the HDD to 160 MB and am running tiger, but have not seen any improvement. What am I missing?

Thanks.
 
YouTube is not one thing. However, many YouTube videos are in FLV (Flash) format. Flash on the Mac has an absolutely terrible reputation.
 
A 600 MHz Pentium would struggle just like that iBook today. Or maybe more or less the same. The iBook's graphics was made to play the DVDs nicely. However: They couldn't predict that some years later, youtube would come along and push playing video formats through the Flash plugin. Hence the difference in performance. You won't be able to correct this.

It's still a nice computer for light surfing (forget Flash) and E-Mail as well as writing etc. For anything "new", it's too old a computer. Period.
 
Well, that's too bad, although as you said, it's a good little unit otherwise. I do have a homebuilt PC, 1GHz Celeron, 512MB, with a turn-of-the-century graphics card, that does most of the stuff I'm referring to. Would have hoped that this here iBook could keep up...

Actually, this machine is my daughter's right now, and she (HS junior) is the one who really whines about the video. It's so much a part of their culture, they can't fathom something this "ancient" amid their techno-playthings. If you are old enough to know what "slo-scan" refers to, you know that I don't care so much about the limitation.

So next year she goes off to college and gets a brand new MacBook, and I'll inherit this one back. It's good enough for me, especially since I upgraded to Tiger (how about Leopard? Is it even worth trying? I have plenty of disk space.) I even manage to steal a little time on it occasionally, like now when she's gone to bed.

Anyway, thanks for your responses, and hopefully, I'll be posting soon to ask about the used Intel MBP that I'll have just picked up...
 
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