My dell craptop is toast, so I'll have to dip into my Mac Pro fund for a new portable...Already have iMac 20" CD for heavy photoshop etc (will be replaced by Mac Pro), but i'd like to be able to play network shared videos to my analog TV with a video out adapter. So the question is whether the iBook G4 will play video (mostly around 780x480 divx or quicktime, some smaller formats but also wide dv and 1280x720 from friends' indy films) smoothly.
The iBook would be either the 1.0 or 1.2ghz 12" models which both had ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 cards I believe. 512mb ram minimum, I'd probably throw in a 1gig chip when i found $100 kicking around (could be a while). I could disable dashboard etc. if that helped, this computer would just be for video/music at home and photo storage and light editing when on the road.
I'd just get a macbook, but I really can't justify the cheapest macbook I've seen ($8xx+tax&shipping) vs about $400 shipped for one of these G4s (same price as 2 gigs of ram will be for the Mac Pro, sigh). G4s will be obsolete much faster, but for well under half the price, it seems like a good proposition.
I'd assume these machines can handle the video, but notebooks are tough to guage. My Pentium III 733mhz desktop can handle 720p video (just barely) despite its 6 year old gpu, while an ibook G3 I used couldn't handle the tv spots on apple's site and a year old pentium 4 laptop at work can't stop stuttering on 720.
Thanks in advance for your input!
The iBook would be either the 1.0 or 1.2ghz 12" models which both had ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 cards I believe. 512mb ram minimum, I'd probably throw in a 1gig chip when i found $100 kicking around (could be a while). I could disable dashboard etc. if that helped, this computer would just be for video/music at home and photo storage and light editing when on the road.
I'd just get a macbook, but I really can't justify the cheapest macbook I've seen ($8xx+tax&shipping) vs about $400 shipped for one of these G4s (same price as 2 gigs of ram will be for the Mac Pro, sigh). G4s will be obsolete much faster, but for well under half the price, it seems like a good proposition.
I'd assume these machines can handle the video, but notebooks are tough to guage. My Pentium III 733mhz desktop can handle 720p video (just barely) despite its 6 year old gpu, while an ibook G3 I used couldn't handle the tv spots on apple's site and a year old pentium 4 laptop at work can't stop stuttering on 720.
Thanks in advance for your input!