What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[Minghold]

I have installed Snow Leopard on my 2010 Mac Mini Server to act as a media/video player. Does anyone know a good or updated video player for SL? I currently use VLC and MPlayer OS X Extended

Q. In what way is the VLC you're using now insufficient?

(It's too bad PotPlayer doesn't have a Mac version.)

 

[Minghold]

You find the nicest things inside recycled DVD-era macbooks. Bought ten of them for $100, and found a 1tb and a 2tb SATA SSD in two of them (go look up the price of those stupid things right now). One MB was a rare i7 mid-2012 DVD 15" (supports up to Catalina and has USB3); most mid-'12s were 13" i5s. Picked up ten 1tb spinner 2.5" drives for $50 to slap in old 'books. Also grabbed a 2017 27" w/2.12tb Fusion and 40gb DDR4 for $75.

Make friends with an ewaste recycler and buy every Intel-era Mac that you can.

 

[alex_free]

I’ve been working on a top secret YouTube download tool for early intel. Essentially it’s all the work I did towards (the still u released) PPCMC7 but was supposed to be more optimized for Mac OS X 10.9+. So that means automatic “best res at requested maximum quality” set by users, choice of video codec (AV1, VP9, or AVC1 (H.264), and much more.

That was until… yt-dlp dropped the standalone legacy Mac OS build (that includes python, SSL, certs, and just works OTB).

So the only reason I’m seeing they dropped it is GitHub dropped 10.13 “runners” to make releases. So now the standalone yt-dlp requires Catalina, and the newest Mac OS I run is 10.13 currently on the air dual booted with fedora 44. So I’m gonna see if it really is as easy as “setup 10.13 Mac ports and run pyinstaller” first…. Because if we can get standalone yet-dlp executables back that would be great and I can run it on my sierra Mac mini late 2012 and MacBook Air 2017 running high sierra.

See… what really is pushing this for me is the Mac mini late 2012 base model (dual core 2.5ghz Intel hd 4000) maxed out can handle 4k VP9 YouTube if they are downloaded in both Mac OS 10.12 and Fedora 44. The browser makes too much overhead for this to work smoothly, but if you use an active display port 4k@60hz to HMDI adapter, an HDMI 2.0 cable, and set it for 30hz in either OS you can actually watch 4k content from YouTube like this by spoofing the user agent to iOS (which my tool does).

So anyone with cheese grater Mac pros, or better yet even a quad core i7 Mac mini late 2012 can do this too if they want. I just think currently limiting it to Catalina and or Linux (works on both) is kinda not right, I should try to get older Mac OS versions working too.

I will say you really need at least the dual core i5 2.5GHZ/Intel HD 4000 or better with 8GBs or more of RAM. And funny enough Mac OS has much less CPU usage then Linux running these videos.

Even the MacBook Air 2017 with an Intel HD 6000 has such a slower CPU (this is all software decoded on early Intels) is a much worse choice then a maxed out late 2012 mini just due to it having a 1.6GHz dual core CPU.

So… we will see.

 

[alex_free]

I’ve been working on a top secret YouTube download tool for early intel. Essentially it’s all the work I did towards (the still unreleased) PPCMC7 update but was supposed to be more optimized for Mac OS X 10.9+. So that means automatic “best res at requested maximum quality” set by users, choice of video codec (AV1, VP9, or AVC1 (H.264), and much more.

That was until… yt-dlp dropped the standalone legacy Mac OS build (that includes python, SSL, certs, and just works OTB).

So the only reason I’m seeing they dropped it is GitHub dropped 10.13 “runners” to make releases. So now the standalone yt-dlp requires Catalina, and the newest Mac OS I run is 10.13 currently on the air dual booted with fedora 44. So I’m gonna see if it really is as easy as “setup 10.13 Mac ports and run pyinstaller” first…. Because if we can get standalone yet-dlp executables back that would be great and I can run it on my sierra Mac mini late 2012 and MacBook Air 2017 running high sierra. They were targeting 10.9+ with that until a few months ago (and that is actually the oldest fw with official 4k support anyways).

See… what really is pushing this for me is the Mac mini late 2012 base model (dual core 2.5ghz Intel hd 4000) maxed out can handle 4k VP9 YouTube if they are downloaded in both Mac OS 10.12 and Fedora 44. The browser makes too much overhead for this to work smoothly, but if you use an active display port 4k@60hz to HMDI adapter, an HDMI 2.0+ cable, and set it for 30hz in either OS you can actually watch 4k content from YouTube like this by spoofing the user agent to iOS (which my tool does). That’s actually crazy if you think about it. Sounds kinda familiar too as well with PPCMC7, eh? Browser makes too much overhead, but ripping the video and playing it with no other programs open makes it actually possible. Impressive…

So anyone with cheese grater Mac pros, or better yet even a quad core i7 Mac mini late 2012 can do this too if they want. I just think currently limiting it to Catalina and or Linux (works on both) is kinda not right, I should try to get older Mac OS versions working too. There is the “Hail Mary” PPCMC7 method if all else fails, but i think standalone yt-dlp “Mac OS legacy” can probably just be built still which is a start.

I will say you really need at least the dual core i5 2.5GHZ/Intel HD 4000 or better with 8GBs or more of RAM. And funny enough Mac OS has much less CPU usage then Linux running these videos.

Even the MacBook Air 2017 with an Intel HD 6000 has such a slower CPU (this is all software decoded on early Intels) is a much worse choice then a maxed out late 2012 mini just due to it having an i5 1.6GHz dual core CPU.

So… we will see. I will say 1440p is doable in browser. This is for those who want to archive the highest quality streams and push the hardware the furthest absolutely possible (who doesn’t enjoy that??). I let you choose from AVC1/H.264 (PPC compatible, as well as many other devices like legacy iOS and Xbox 360 native media player), VP9 (much higher file size then AV1 but kinda same quality and in formats like 4k available and takes much less CPU), and AV1 ( newest format with best compression, available in 4k like VP9 but completely not worth it on a lowly i5 2.5ghz/intel hd 4000 due to performance).

But yea, it’s great. You configure the tool “I want up to 4k but VP9 only” and it does just that if available. If it was some YouTube video uploaded 20 year ago only available in 480p, it’ll do that too by automatically detecting your maximum resolution preference and getting the best match highest res available. And you can always change around between avc1/h.264, VP9, and AV1 depending on your needs.

And to make it more fun, this is completely unsupported by Apple. The late 2012 mini is HDMI 1.3, and the MacBook Air 2017 is HDMI 1.4. HDMI 2.0 is the first 4k was supported in any capacity, but with that thunderbolt gen 1 port we have a workaround that lets us get up to 30fps (30hz) which is fine for playing back video. And yes, VP9 4k 2160p no dropped frames @30fps for YouTube on the Mac mini late 2012 maxed out works this way 😉

 

[Minghold]

just think currently limiting it to Catalina and or Linux (works on both) is kinda not right, I should try to get older Mac OS versions working too.

Catalina was Apple greatest insult to its customers, the Everest rising above and dwarfing all the others, and it continues being insulting to this day as devs still supporting "MacOS 10" invariably support only the cynical 10.15 (Catalina) version.

 

[alex_free]

Catalina was Apple greatest insult to its customers, the Everest rising above and dwarfing all the others, and it continues being insulting to this day as devs still supporting "MacOS 10" invariably support only the cynical 10.15 (Catalina) version.

Yes exactly… I don’t want to be part of the problem.

Catalina is **really** when it started going downhill. With 10.13 and below you can put the AV in a box and run what you want as someone who compiles c code they write themselves… nowadays they give you 20 pop ups and refurse to run open source code if you don’t have the right settings. It’s really just sad I’ll keep trying to release portable Mac stuff but if it doesn’t work OTB without modifying a ton of system settings not much I can do. This is not what Steve Jobs meant at all this is cursed, we were supposed to bring Mach kernel and bsd userland imo the mainstream without limitations, and solve the driver issue that made it hard to run. 😭

 

[Amethyst1]

HDMI 2.0 is the first 4k was supported in any capacity, but with that thunderbolt gen 1 port we have a workaround that lets us get up to 30fps (30hz) which is fine for playing back video.

Thunderbolt 1 being DisplayPort 1.1 has a 360 MHz pixel clock limit (at 8bpc RGB), but the HD 3000 and 4000 are further limited to 270 MHz in macOS. -- Since the video decoding is done entirely by the CPU an eGPU wouldn't be a game changer but at least get you past these DP 1.1 limits. (I remember back in the day there was a hack to get 4K60 via HDMI 1.4 on NVIDIA GPUs but it used horrible chroma subsampling).

 

[boswald]

Busy week. The Black MacBook has arrived. As well as having no HDD, it was also giving the ‘RAM says no’ beeps of doom when first powered on. Have swapped in some alternative sticks (alas I only had 2x1GB in my spare RAM bucket that was compatible), thrown in an old spinny HDD, grabbed one of my macOS USB installers and here we are booted into Lion. 😀

View attachment 2631100

What a machine.😍

Cosmetically it’s in amazing shape for its age. Exterior plastic is covered in little blemishes, as these plastic ones all are, but the display/keyboard/trackpad etc are all in great shape. Battery even holds some charge, though it is at ‘replace soon’ unsurprisingly.

Now it’s confirmed to be working, I’ll try a straight swap of the hard drive from my white A1181 dual booting Snow Leopard/Windows XP. Hopefully that won’t cause any conflicts with firmware or anything. 😒 Then that white A1181 can join my eBay sales and I’ll just keep the other white A1181 running multiple Linux distros alongside the black one. 😊

I absolutely love the way that looks. I wish we could get those high-quality icons back!

 

[alex_free]

I absolutely love the way that looks. I wish we could get those high-quality icons back!

I have a blackbook as well, maxed out 4 gigs of ram and an ssd. It’s the best win xp machine ever. I also have 10.4 and 10.7 on it. Actually was my first Mac, mid 2007 2.16ghz C2D.

 

[alex_free]

Thunderbolt 1 being DisplayPort 1.1 has a 360 MHz pixel clock limit (at 8bpc RGB), but the HD 3000 and 4000 are further limited to 270 MHz in macOS. -- Since the video decoding is done entirely by the CPU an eGPU wouldn't be a game changer but at least get you past these DP 1.1 limits. (I remember back in the day there was a hack to get 4K60 via HDMI 1.4 on NVIDIA GPUs but it used horrible chroma subsampling).

I truly think 4k60 might be doable with an egpu and they actually work with thunderbolt 1 to 3 adapter. I can’t attest to if it’s even fast enough to do that, but even just 4k30 as is is enough with this and it’s already absolutely maxing the GPU fill rate on an hd 4000. I would never recommend any worse GPU for this because it’s just impossible. The late 2012 mini can barely eek this out but it does and theirs plenty of Mac pros and MacBook pros that are basically the same setup

 

[joevt]

I truly think 4k60 might be doable with an egpu and they actually work with thunderbolt 1 to 3 adapter. I can’t attest to if it’s even fast enough to do that, but even just 4k30 as is is enough with this and it’s already absolutely maxing the GPU fill rate on an hd 4000. I would never recommend any worse GPU for this because it’s just impossible. The late 2012 mini can barely eek this out but it does and theirs plenty of Mac pros and MacBook pros that are basically the same setup

Go to https://egpu.io , click on "Builds", select "Thunderbolt 1" from the "eGPU port" filter popup menu, sort by "System model". There are 94 entries for Mac models between 2011 and 2014 using macOS, Linux, or Windows.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

So the only reason I’m seeing they dropped it is GitHub dropped 10.13 “runners” to make releases. So now the standalone yt-dlp requires Catalina, and the newest Mac OS I run is 10.13 currently on the air dual booted with fedora 44. So I’m gonna see if it really is as easy as “setup 10.13 Mac ports and run pyinstaller” first…. Because if we can get standalone yet-dlp executables back that would be great and I can run it on my sierra Mac mini late 2012 and MacBook Air 2017 running high sierra. They were targeting 10.9+ with that until a few months ago (and that is actually the oldest fw with official 4k support anyways).

You know I have yt-dlp working on 10.9, right?

https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/download-video-automator-service/releases/download/2025.11.22/Download.Video.dmg

The embedded version of yt-dlp is not a single file like the old legacy yt-dlp releases, but it is self-contained. You don't need to have anything else installed on your system, nor will anything be installed—it all lives in this single .workflow file.

Right now the .workflow will always download the maximum quality available (excluding the AV1 codec), although it prefers h264 if it's available without a resolution reduction. I've been meaning to make a separate version you could install which would limit it to h264 only (this is, in practice, a one-line change in the workflow), but have not gotten around to it.

On an appropriately powerful machine, all downloads can play right in QuickTime 10.2 when the VP9 codec is installed.

 

[eyoungren]

Looks like my NVIDIA NVS 510 has failed.



Sigh…only six displays until the replacement arrives. 😉 😀

 

[Minghold]

Catalina is **really** when it started going downhill. With 10.13 and below you can put the AV in a box and run what you want as someone who compiles c code they write themselves… nowadays they give you 20 pop ups and refurse to run open source code if you don’t have the right settings. It’s really just sad I’ll keep trying to release portable Mac stuff but if it doesn’t work OTB without modifying a ton of system settings not much I can do.

MacOS10.X needs to be forked in the worst way (and the Mavericks Forever guy, whom I cannot get ahold of, seems like he has the technical chops). In particular, if we could eliminate all the hidden telemetry and bloat between Snow Leopard and Sierra, we'd shave a full gig off ram consumption.

 

[Gloomy]

Agreed there, Ming. @Wowfunhappy has done wonders for the preservation of Mountain Lion-Mavericks era Mac OS X. My iMac shipped with 10.8.4 so it holds a special place in my heart.

 

[Amethyst1]

Looks like my NVIDIA NVS 510 has failed.

Ugh. If shipping weren't so horrendous I'd gladly let you have mine for free. 😀

 

[Wowfunhappy]

and the Mavericks Forever guy, whom I cannot get ahold of, seems like he has the technical chops

You can't get ahold of me?

 

[eyoungren]

Ugh. If shipping weren't so horrendous I'd gladly let you have mine for free. 😀

Oh, no worries. I dropped ~$20 for a replacement on eBay. Should be here by Thursday. The seller was on it and I had a tracking number on Memorial Day. Sheesh! I wasn't expecting that, but glad nonetheless.

Anyway, it would seem that the current one I have is a PNY version. My experience has not been great with PNY branded cards. The next one (by the auction photos) does not have a PNY stamp.

I'm also going to take the opportunity when it arrives to take a vacuum cleaner to the Mac and the area around it. So, that's a side benefit I guess. 🙂

EDIT: Yeah, USPS has the card already. Fast seller…

 

[Amethyst1]

Anyway, it would seem that the current one I have is a PNY version. My experience has not been great with PNY branded cards. The next one (by the auction photos) does not have a PNY stamp.

All Quadro and NVS cards are manufactured by PNY.

 

[Minghold]

You can't get ahold of me?

....(!) I dimly recall trying the contact email from the M-F site without receiving any reply. And for some reason it didn't connect to me while reading past material about it here that you were the creator. <check mirror><I may be having senior moments>

All that now behind us, how difficult would it be to take a meat-cleaver to all the accumulating crud between, say, Mavericks and Catalina? (The horrendous slow-down and increased memory-consumption at various points has always mystified me. E.g., Snow Leopard > Lion, El Capitan > Sierra, etc. Disabling MRT and MDS_stores alleviates the beating on the hard-drives and reduces ram usage a little, but not enough. Even running an everything-including-kitchen-sink debloat script doesn't remotely cover the difference. E.g., Gatekeeper is still slowly snuffling through every first-opened app and dmg.

Other goals: restore 32bit and HFS+ boot ability to Catalina. (This would make 32bit accessible to all 2019 and 2020 intel models currently denied Mojave.) Hack: make a Carbon Copy Cloner 5 Catalina-compatable.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

....(!) I dimly recall trying the contact email from the M-F site without receiving any reply. And for some reason it didn't connect to me while reading past material about it here that you were the creator. <check mirror><I may be having senior moments>

It's possible I missed your email, sorry! A bunch of people email me and sometimes I forget to respond.

All that now behind us, how difficult would it be to take a meat-cleaver to all the accumulating crud between, say, Mavericks and Catalina?

Very hard. You can disable some services but I don't think that's really going to improve perceived performance.

Other goals: restore 32bit and HFS+ boot ability to Catalina.

Restoring 32bit support in Catalina is virtually impossible. It's easy enough to make Catalina able to execute 32 bit binaries (there's a boot flag which will do it), the problem is that all the 32 bit libraries which apps need have been removed. We're talking about basically every library, not just one or two.

I've seen discussions before about maybe redirecting Catalina to use Mojave libraries, but even if you could get that working you'd basically just be using a less stable and more crash-prone Mojave.

---

Catalina was released around the time I decided to move to Mavericks. I looked into this kind of stuff. And where I landed was, it's much better to just move to an older OS. Trying to modify a newer OS to work like an old one is a losing proposition. Much better to use the real thing.

P.S. HFS+ is an awful file system, sorry. It might be possible to make Catalina boot from it, but you shouldn't want this. The one good thing I can say about HFS+ is that it forces me to keep backups.

 

[eyoungren]

All Quadro and NVS cards are manufactured by PNY.

Hmmm…

Here is the back of the new card, image provided by the seller.



Here is the back of my current (dead?) card…



Note that none of the PNY stickers on my card are present on the one the seller is sending me. Maybe PNY stopped branding the cards? It would appear the card I am being sent has a newer BIOS (and a much higher serial number).

 

[Minghold]

P.S. HFS+ is an awful file system, sorry. It might be possible to make Catalina boot from it, but you shouldn't want this. The one good thing I can say about HFS+ is that it forces me to keep backups.

I disagree. (Apple's Disk Utility, otoh, is a piece of garbage that does as little as possible as it can to keep minimally functional.) And I've had plenty of corrupt APFS partitions where TM is your only recourse, meaning the partition itself cannot be salvaged by any existant tool.

--I'd have no objection to APFS if it wrote data in a manner consistent with the type of storage-media it was writing to (i.e. random skitter for flash/SSDs and consecutive tracks for anything else), but Apple used it as a deliberate vandalescence mechanic to prematurely wear drives in most 2012-2019 machines).

All that said, I note that HFS+ seems more fragile in OSes prior to High Sierra (almost as if Apple had bungled the journaling).

 

[DCBassman]

Trashcan now a MavericksForever machine. Quick!
A question: I habe a '12 Mini, an 09 Mini, and an A1355 Time capsule. Should I stack them, or would they be better set on edge?

 

[eyoungren]

All Quadro and NVS cards are manufactured by PNY.

Well…it was fun while it lasted. New card does not work. System will not boot with it in. I can't even get it into Safe Mode with the new card in.

Could be the slot. Could be the system. Could be I need to reapply root patches one more time, IDK. I can't move the other two cards though. And I'm not in the market for replacing the old cards.

I may test again at some later time, but for right now it's back to six displays. I'm disappointed, but I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

EDIT: Yeah, futzed some more with root patching and tried the old card once again. No joy. I suppose I could try reinstalling the OS, but I don't think that'll work. Old card seems to be dead, although I can boot to safe mode with it in. New card freezes the system on boot, either a normal boot or Safe Mode. I wonder if the BIOS is too new.

Looks like I will be rearranging my desk this weekend. 🙁

EDIT2: I ordered a second card off eBay, this time checking the BIOS version. This new one has the same BIOS as my old card and was made in the same year (2013). So, we shall see.

If that card doesn't work then I have a Windows XP machine that's going to have some nice video cards. 🙄