PowerMac G4 and XBMC, need advice.

[rowanhall]

Hello,

I am currently working on a PowerMac G4, with 500mhz cpu and 512mb ram. It has a ATI rage 128 pro agp graphics card with 16mb of video ram. I have it installed with tiger (10.4.11).

I plan to use the machine connected to a tv, as a player for divx and xvid files using the XBMC frontend.

My issue is that when playing videos from the local hard drive in XBMC, the video playback is slightly laggy and the audio is choppy and out of sync.

This wasn't unexpected, but i was wondering if any forum users would have any advice on speeding the machine up, either with software or additional hardware.

Thanks in advance,
Rowan

 

[Dr.Pants]

Get MacTracker and/or find out your Model Identifier. From there you can figure out what and how much you can upgrade - for instance, there are several processor upgrades for the G4, but several are locked into specific G4 models - some upgrades for a "Sawtooth" will not go into a "Yikes" G4, etc etc. And some processors actualy clock DOWN the FSB 😱 even though their clock speeds are massive.

Still, find some more SDRAM for that G4 - that should speed things up.

 

[sngx1275]

Have you tried them in VLC to see if you run into the same issues? What is the CPU load when playing the files you are having issues with?

I don't think you should have much of a problem playing them with that computer. I have a PowerMac G4 533Mhz with 768Megs of RAM running Leopard and I can play 1.4gig xvid movies without any problems with Quicktime (and Perian) while running Transmission (although only seeding).