All my media files are AVI, so that is a moot point. I really don't care about the difference between 1080p and plain DVD quality. Also, Hulu only supports up to 480p, which is where most of this machine's usage is going to come from when it's not pulling movies from my iMac's Hard Drive. But thank you for making the point you have already posted in three other replies on this thread, that was quite nice of you.
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Power Mac Quicksilver edition upgrades
- Thread starter greedyhands
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Hulu?
Listen 300,
I don't quite understand why you decided you wanted to argue with me on every single topic here, but I would really appreciate it if you stopped. I started this thread to get advice on upgrading a Power Mac G4, not to ask whether I should or not. I am not the type of person who enjoys arguing. If you don't agree with this project I am undertaking, I would like to kindly ask you to please refrain from commenting at all. Yes, I use Hulu, and I rather enjoy it. As this project is to set up a system for me, I am not concerned about whether someone else would, or would not watch Hulu. I came to this forum for advice, and to bounce ideas off of fellow mac enthusiasts, not to argue.
Everyone else,
Since this thread seems to be full of debate now, I am just going to start another one once I'm finished and post pictures of the results. I am designing I really neat dual monitor system and am interested to see how it turns out.
Cheers,
Andy
I record the EyeTV HD channels at full 1080 and it plays back from the hard drive on the G4 just as well as it does on my Mac Pro. Broadcast TV is still all MPEG-2 I believe, which EyeTV records straight to disk as MPEG-2 exactly as it receives it. So playing from disk and software or from broadcast and receiver is no different and both are smooth playback at full resolution.
I can even play back recorded HD while recording new broadcast HD at the same time, so there's not even a bottleneck using the same drive for both at the same time with an ATA-IDE drive.
I'm still not sure where you're getting this from, but you seem quite adamant about it so I thought I'd better check to see if I'm just imagining things, so I transferred a 1080 Quicktime movie I actually took myself with a 1080 camera and edited in Final Cut Pro and it again plays just as well on the G4 at full resolution on a 1920 x 1200 display as it does on the Mac Pro.
I'm just not seeing the "won't" and "can't" you keep referring to. 1080 HD video plays fine on my G4 MDD, not even the tiniest hiccup.
I am really curious to see what you do with yours.
I have a PM933.
What I am really interested in seeing, is how you will lower the sound of the power supply. It is rather loud.
Don't worry about him/her.
Just enjoy your project.
Blu-ray did indeed use MPEG-2, before switching to MPEG-4. So I've used Compressor to export the same 1080 clip to MP4 H.264 at full 1920x1080 30fps and it plays on the G4. A little jerky, but it plays.
Actually I am going to have one monitor be the tv, which is about 8-10ft away from the couch. Then on the wall to the left of the couch I am going to have a second monitor on a dual arm mount that extends and swivels. This way I will be able to surf or photoshop on the 20" close to me, while watching a movie on the 47". We'll see if the computer will be able to handle that. If not I'll probably just leave the monitor setup and use a different computer.
I'm not trying to argue - there is a difference in architecture (RISC vs. CICS), but my friend can play 1080 material on his Lenovo S10, with the N270 processor. I don't know the specs on the Power G4 processor in particular (anybody care to hint me a model number? I am interested as well), but I am pretty sure that it could handle it.
However, Greedy, personally I don't think that you will get good performance with the G4 multitasking thanks to the single-core. Just me though, I could be wrong.
If you want to spend the money and want excellent performace, purchase a Sonnet PCI SATA card so you can throw in some fast cheap hard drives. IDE drives are slow and lower capacities not to mention more costly. Two WD 300gb Raptors in a RAID would really increase some performace
This may or not play into effect, but two Raptors in RAID-0 might hit a bottleneck in the PCI bus. Since the Sonnet card looks like a 32-bit card, the actual bandwidth would be 133 MB/s
confused wheras the two WD3000GLFS (Velociraptors) have a write speed of 70-80 megabytes/second (Same thing as MB/s, right?); idk, two in RAID-0 should be just fine, but adding more should not give any big gains. Personally, two larger 1TB SATA drives might be what you are looking for (large amounts of media, right?), and are generally cheaper then the Raptor drives.