QT and 10.1 major speed problems

B

buggs1a

Registered
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.
 
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 :D

Maybe there is a problem with your installation????!?!?!?!?!?
 
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! :confused:
 
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.
 
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.
Click to expand...




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...
 
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
 
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?

:D
 
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?
 
Originally posted by buggs1a
re install no good. lolol. it is offical, QT sucks in 10.l1.
Click to expand...
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
 
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?
 
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?



:D
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.

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.
Click to expand...
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?
 
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.
 
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).
Click to expand...

Try playing it in full screen then.
 
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.
 
Originally posted by ink


Try playing it in full screen then.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.

This is just a theory.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top