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PowerPC and Bluray

AdrianK said:
Again, too broad. It depends on the model, clock speed, whether it's mobile or desktop class. If you look at geekbench charts, C2Ds have scores from 1227 to 3799. Try playing a bluray on a 1GHz U7500 ;)
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You got me there :eek: . I assumed the C2D was a 2GHz+ since my Dell laptop with 2GHz C2D can play blu-ray and my dell desktop with Pentium Dual-Core(The low end C2D models) at 2GHz can play blu-ray too.

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bizzle said:
Sure it can play it. At what frame rate, 6? You're delusional to think that it plays properly. I've had plenty of maxed out G4s in my day that couldn't even do it.

I ran a dual 2.0ghz G5 as a media player for a while and it couldn't handle jack worth of 1080p.
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Does it matter what frame rate once it plays it smoothly? It might help that I'm using an optimised MPlayer build.
 
AdrianK said:
Simply because decoding high resolution, high bitrate video is very taxing on the CPU. The Quad is really the only PowerPC mac that has the grunt to decode bluray-spec video. Other PowerPC macs can play 1080p video, but it would need to be converted to a less CPU-taxing form first.
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In the past, one could play H264 encoded blu-ray videos on PowerMac with CorePlayer (fastest H264 player around!). It uses only one core as it is not multithreaded, but can still play all high-bitrates BBC documentary programmes blu-rays like Wild Pacific and Wild China, which are particularly taxing on CPU. Coreplayer plays 720p movies smooth on PowerBook G4 as well.

Nowadays, ffmpeg, mplayer and VLC support mulithreaded H264 playback. Two G5 cores are needed for frame loss Blu-Ray playback, so any PowerMac G5 could do.

WMV encoded blurays are still problematic on PPC architecture. Flip4mac up to 2.1.x versions were very fast on PPC and had potential. Unfortunately, decoder in 2.1.x has bugs and produces lots of artifacts when decoding WMV. Flip4Mac from version 2.2.x onwards are way slower on PPC, like twice as slower as earlier releases. Telestream never addressed the performance issue. See the following thread: http://forum.telestream.net/forum/m...9&threadid=3683&highlight_key=y&keyword1=quad
 
Wouldn't the video card also play a major role? If the video card is handling the decode that would take a lot of stress off of the CPU. If we are talking c2d the earlier MacBooks had intel gma 950. That chip has issues with any high def content
 
The issue isn't playing so much as the decrypting. The application I found that said it was a universal wasn't.
 
crewkid89 said:
Wouldn't the video card also play a major role?
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Yes... this is where any video card in the Nvidia 6xxx series or newer and any ATi card in the newer 9xxx inclusive of the 8500 Mac edition comes into its own with hardware video decoding chips on the video card designed specifically for this purpose. Obviously not Blu-Ray in the days of the ATi 8500 but you get the picture that it takes over video decoding from the CPU and really makes light work of things in a low CPU power machine.

VLC will do hardware decoding on your video card so long as you have Quartz Extreme and a compatible video card.

In this day and age you should be aiming for no less than a Nvidia 6200 (PCI)/6600(AGP) or ATi 8500(AGP)/9200(PCI) as a display card in any PPC mac. That covers all bases either PCI or AGP.
 
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Lancer said:
For the quality BluRay is not much more than DVD, the burners are more expensive and from what I've been told PPC are not supported, I have a G5.

I'll be looking at getting an external BD after I get my new iMac.
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Proper high def content that was filmed in HD and viewed on a quality screen is amazingly more detailed than DVD.

I have a NIN concert in HD-DVD and you can see that people are filming the concert on their mobile phones - you can see the screens in fairly decent detail.

I was a doubter until i saw some proper HD content - the difference is amazing.
 
That's the problem with a lot of the early BD/HDDVD content. A lot of it isn't true HD, but that's not so much the problem of the studios but to do with the film and the original camera used.

Film shot on 35mm will still be cinema quality as if you were watching it with the best cinema technology that was available at the time it was filmed, but it won't be HD in the sense of modern HD digital taken from the newest camera equipment available.

It's a technology issue... when there is no HD film stock you get the best quality film stock the studio had at the time upscaled for 1080 viewing and in that sense you see all the detail in the film grain and cigarette burn marks to tell the person running the film when to change film rolls. It's not like the studio can go back and magically reshoot a movie for you, they work with the best film stock from their archives they have and digitally remaster it and this is how you get Blu-Ray content for movies that were shot before HD was available.

The definition of Kodachrome is amazing as an example of film that was used for over 60 years and its capable of impressively high resolution including 1080p but its still film stock and you get to see the content really warts and all as you would have sitting in a cinema chair watching film as opposed to digital content.

This is something to marvel at in itself though... A real legacy to the era of the flickering lights of real cinema film rather than the digital cinemas of today.
 
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orestes1984 said:
That's the problem with a lot of the early BD/HDDVD content. A lot of it isn't true HD, but that's not so much the problem of the studios but to do with the film and the original camera used.

Film shot on 35mm will still be cinema quality as if you were watching it with the best cinema technology that was available at the time it was filmed, but it won't be HD in the sense of modern HD digital taken from the newest camera equipment available.

It's a technology issue... when there is no HD film stock you get the best quality film stock the studio had at the time upscaled for 1080 viewing and in that sense you see all the detail in the film grain and cigarette burn marks to tell the person running the film when to change film rolls. It's not like the studio can go back and magically reshoot a movie for you, they work with the best film stock from their archives they have and digitally remaster it and this is how you get Blu-Ray content for movies that were shot before HD was available.
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Interesting. Obviously quality of the media can be an issue, but I always thought the effective "resolution" of film was far higher than digital. I am thinking back to my B+W photography class where I was able to enlarge the tiniest spiderweb I had found in a negative I shot to the size of a 9x12. Fun stuff
 
crewkid89 said:
Interesting. Obviously quality of the media can be an issue, but I always thought the effective "resolution" of film was far higher than digital. I am thinking back to my B+W photography class where I was able to enlarge the tiniest spiderweb I had found in a negative I shot to the size of a 9x12. Fun stuff
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It is and you're 100% correct, even today's high end 30mp+ digital cameras don't come close to what film film SLRs and cameras are capable of but as with everything that is not digital there is artifacts such as film grain that come with it that are not produced with digital film. Don't quote me on this but I remember reading somewhere along time ago now that you would need digital film in the order of 200 to 300mp for it to be truly equal film in terms of the detail it could capture. The current highest end cameras have a lens capable of capturing something in the order of 50 megapixels.

Now I personally love Kodachrome photography and other things like Super 8, but you take it for what it is and as a product of its time and as with the transition from records to CDs we have seen a standard that may not be technically better, but removes the pops and crackles and doesn't require high end gear like the type it would have taken to play like Michael Jacksons Thriller recorded in Stereo 2.1 to make it sound/look good gear so consumers prefer that instead.

Besides, who has the money for a film projector in their home to view that movie in true cinema quality? If you were rich in the old days you might have had a super 8 projector, but these things were expensive and not common. Now you can come pretty close just by popping in a BD and getting out your 3D glasses for less than $1000.
 
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Orestes I completely agree. what I meant was it is possible to make amazingly good film transfers to blu ray. The new jaws for example was fantastic
 
crewkid89 said:
Orestes I completely agree. what I meant was it is possible to make amazingly good film transfers to blu ray. The new jaws for example was fantastic
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Of course, theres brilliant examples and not so brilliant ones, one of my favourites for picture quality is actually Shawshank Redemption not just because its a good movie. You see every little detail.
 
OK, status update..

BluRay is fine on my quad video is stellar audio is AWESOME!

The process goes like this I convert to MKV on the MacBook Pro then drag back to the Quad. I play the MKV with VLC..

If anyone knows where I can get a Blu Ray ripper or an older copy of Make MKV I'm willing to either pay a finders fee or pay for the app itself if you wrote it or compiled it...
 
orestes1984 said:
Just grab an old version of Handbrake

http://mac.oldapps.com/handbrake.php?old_handbrake=22

I'm not sure what you're going to do for tagging though... that is if you care. It's not so much an issue unless you're running a media player, but MetaX doesn't really play all that nicely with iTunes and its not as nice as iDentify either.
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handbrake is not capable of ripping/decoding a bluray. the only program I currently know of is makemkv and I am pretty sure it is intel only
 
No Handbrake won't decrypt BluRay..

I've done the internet search for a fat binary decrypter and can't find one that's why I was asking..
 
Honestly I know this probably isn't what you want to hear, but on my Core i5 iMac, it takes 6-12 hours to transcode an makemkv bluray rip to .m4v. I couldn't imagine how slowly an old version of handbrake would crank away at a bluray rip on a G5.

Your best option may be to buy or build a more modern pc and use it solely for ripping and encoding. This is actually a very efficient way to handle this as your main computer won't be tied up with every core running at 100% transcoding videos.

You could run ubuntu with makemkv and handbrake for ripping and encoding and setup a network share to serve the videos over your home network. There are even itunes daap compatible protocols on linux you can check out.

Sorry if any of this didn't make sense, it is very late at night right now
 
Yep, it takes me 6 hours at least to do a full transcode, but once you've got the mkv you can do a pass through with subler instead of recreating the wheel, or in this case container and its contents, with handbrake. A pass through that fits everything into an MP4 container that can be edited or played on just about anything takes about the same time as it does to copy and paste the same file.
 
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crewkid89 said:
Honestly I know this probably isn't what you want to hear, but on my Core i5 iMac, it takes 6-12 hours to transcode an makemkv bluray rip to .m4v. I couldn't imagine how slowly an old version of handbrake would crank away at a bluray rip on a G5.

Your best option may be to buy or build a more modern pc and use it solely for ripping and encoding. This is actually a very efficient way to handle this as your main computer won't be tied up with every core running at 100% transcoding videos.

You could run ubuntu with makemkv and handbrake for ripping and encoding and setup a network share to serve the videos over your home network. There are even itunes daap compatible protocols on linux you can check out.

Sorry if any of this didn't make sense, it is very late at night right now
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You didn't read my post..

I'm not much in interested in in compressing the blue ray I have many TB of storage (16 at last count). I am testing to see how long it's going to take to handbrake a bluray I let it do it's thing when heading off to work this morning at 1% complete it said 7 hrs.
 
A passthrough transmux does not compress the file unless you tell it to :) It just puts it in a new container. A transcode may compress the file and add artifiacts that werent there before.

A transmux using something like subler is like making your lunch in one lunchbox and then taking it out and putting it into a different lunchbox.

A transcode is like remaking the lunch and the lunchbox while your at it, which may not ever turn out the same as the original ;)
 
orestes1984 said:
A passthrough transmux does not compress the file unless you tell it to :) It just puts it in a new container. A transcode may compress the file and add artifiacts that werent there before.

A transmux using something like subler is like making your lunch in one lunchbox and then taking it out and putting it into a different lunchbox.

A transcode is like remaking the lunch and the lunchbox while your at it, which may not ever turn out the same as the original ;)
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VLC Plays the MKV file of the BluRay rip just fine..I really don't know what I use subler for..

In all of this talk please keep in mind I don't own a TV, Apple TV, iPod Touch, and my iPhone became my wifes. I am watching watching these movies on one of my monitors.
 
Ok to get on topic, I don't know of any Blu-Ray ripping software that has fat binaries, I thought I did but was mistaken, best of luck in finding what you need.
 
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