Viewing movies on iBook G3 Clamshell

[sotosoul]

Hello,
I am the lucky owner of a 300MHz first generation iBook G3, with 40GB HDD, 192MB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.9. I wish to watch a movie on this old machine, just for the sake of it. Does anyone know which format should I compress my movie to? Please mention codec, bit rate etc for both audio and video!
Would you say 720p is OK? I wouldn't dare to go as high as 1080

 

[Altemose]

Hello,
I am the lucky owner of a 300MHz first generation iBook G3, with 40GB HDD, 192MB RAM and Mac OS X 10.3.9. I wish to watch a movie on this old machine, just for the sake of it. Does anyone know which format should I compress my movie to? Please mention codec, bit rate etc for both audio and video!
Would you say 720p is OK? I wouldn't dare to go as high as 1080

720p is going to be pushing even a low end G4 depending on format.

 

[harrymatic]

Forget about 720p - you couldn't even display it, the Clamshell display is only 800x600. You could probably just get away with MPEG-2 video in 480p, but you may have issues playing it from USB memory, since the USB controller is only 1.1.

That said, I used to watch TV shows in Windows Media Player format using the dreadful WMP port for OS X on a 500MHz iBook years ago, and that was playing directly from a USB flash drive at 1.1 speeds.

Just try encoding a short sample video into a variety of formats and find what works for you.

 

[sotosoul]

Forget about 720p - you couldn't even display it, the Clamshell display is only 800x600. You could probably just get away with MPEG-2 video in 480p, but you may have issues playing it from USB memory, since the USB controller is only 1.1.

That said, I used to watch TV shows in Windows Media Player format using the dreadful WMP port for OS X on a 500MHz iBook years ago, and that was playing directly from a USB flash drive at 1.1 speeds.

Just try encoding a short sample video into a variety of formats and find what works for you.

Thanks, I was being sarcastic about 720p
So, would you think 320x240 .mov would be viewable?

 

[jruschme]

ISTR that the cool thing back then was to rip DVDs to VCDs and play those on the iBook.