QuickTime _very_ slow on X

[GrandHighOne]

Today I compared playback of .mpeg files in quicktime: QT5 on OS 9 vs. QT5 on OS X.

I used digitized music videos for my "test".

QT5-on-9 (specs in .sig) displays full-screen video (enlarged) without dropping to many frames (= good, high-quality playback)

QT5-on-X had extreme difficulty displaying the video, even at normal size (about 200x200 px)... (= extremely poor quality, unwatchable, ...) (It was the poor performance of QT5-on-X that made me try the same videos in 9...)

Hope this improves with future versions of OS X and QT...

 

[kilowatt]

I made a video on my computer that was 7.1 gigs in size, and no matter what I did, it played *extremely* slow at about 7fps.

This was, of course, un-compressed QT matter.

I've sence compressed it and it plays alot better (400megs now), but does anyone know of a good way to play un-compressed video?

Also, does increasing movie player's memory *decrease* memory avaliable to the QuickTime api, when I'm running pure 9.1?

 

[knighthawk]

kilowatt:

A lot of it has to do with how your hard drive is set up to play movies of that size. If you are running on standard old IDE drives that ship with the computer, you are going to have a trouble reading that much data that fast.

Check to see what your hard drive specs are... if you go to the website of the manufacture, they list the max and average performance of each of their drives by model. If you are using a drive that is 5400 rpm and only a 512k cache, it will run slower than a 7200 rpm 2mb cache drive. Also, the seek time is important (8.5 or slower is ideal).

From what it sounds like to me, you need a SCSI raid system, but it costs bucks. At least look into the Ultra160 card with a 10,000 or even 15,000 rpm speed.

Last but not least, make sure your hard drive is not fragmented. That will severly hinder performance when you are dealing with files that large.