.AVI playing on iMac G5

[NarutoSasuke]

Okay, I was wondering, I have an iMac G5 with a Radeon 9600 video card and I have a Windows machine that has a GeFORCE 2 (with 32 MB VRAM!!!) and honestly, when showing my friends .avi files on VLC, the video sucks!!! It's choppy, it freezes up sometimes, is it just VLC software, or is it the iMac? Just wondering, does anyone know how I can fix this problem?

[Mikuro]

I don't know why VLC wouldn't play it right. Your machine is definitely powerful enough. You could try MPlayer instead. Better yet, install the Divx codec for QuickTime. (If version 5 doesn't work, try the Divx 6 beta).

But VLC really ought to play just fine. It's possible some important settings got messed up, so you might want to try resetting your prefs (there's a reset button in the VLC prefs window).

[NarutoSasuke]

Well, I doubt the preferences is a problem, I've reset them twice and I still get the same problem. Okay, just so that you know, I've restarted the Finder so that the widgets get reset and don't take up any Virtual Memory, HOWEVER, I'm running Firefox, streaming iTunes Radio, and downloading 6GB over wireless connection. All of this with 512MB RAM and trying to watch the movie full-screen. (I NEED IT FULL SCREEN!!) However, with a Radeon 9600, should the VRAM take care of the video processing and encoding. Gosh, my freakin' Pocket PC plays .avi's better than my iMac G5!! Do you have a better idea of what might be the problem?

[Mikuro]

Your graphics card isn't really the dominant factor. Decoding is mostly done in the CPU. If you're running a lot of downloads, disk speed could be a limiting problem.

Disk access is my best guess. My old 450MHz G3 iMac played AVIs pretty well, and it had a mere fraction of the power of your system. However, disk speed will always be a bottleneck for these things. Too many downloads going kills performance like nothing else. And IIRC Acquisition is especially bad in this sense.

By the way, the Finder doesn't control Dashboard widgets. That's actually handled by the Dock. If you want to keep them out of your way, the best way is to open Dashboard, and close every single widget inside. Then control-click on the Dashboard icon in the Dock (if present) and remove it (F12 will still trigger Dashboard after this). Most of the standard widgets included in Tiger don't eat many resources in the background, though, in my experience.

[NarutoSasuke]

Thanks for that help, but I thought there was a way to reset widgets and take them out of memory. For instance, can't you restart Dashboard and cause the wiedgets to reset and be out of memory?

The disk access makes a bunch of sense, if only they put 10,000 RPM drives in iMac's... but that sounds right. Extra RAM would allow me to run movies more smoothly while still downloading stuff, right?

[burning_jonny]

First, sorry for replying to an old thread, but I feel like I am in the same boat.

I am using the latest VLC 0.8.4a, and full screen or not I get the same thing where the movie will 'freeze', and then unfreeze a few seconds after. I usually miss the good stuff when it freezes.

I also have an iMac G5, 2 GHz, with 2 gigs of RAM.

I don't have a lot of apps running ayways...but I've been having the problem every since I go the pc. Reformatting didn't help.


Jonny


PS
mplayer plays good, but it's UI sucks.

[Porce]

I have to alternate between QuickTime and VLC almost weekly to play not only AVI's but MP4's and MOV's. It seems the video gets all choppy in one player and then the next week it works fine, while the other player seems to choke on everything, and then back to the other way around the next week.

[burning_jonny]

Seems like VLC is not all it's cracked up to be. It still is my favourite.

I know I could just use Quicktime once I've installed all the codecs. Or Mplayer plays video well, but VLC's shortcuts are better, UI is better, and the playlist isn't goofy.

I wish there was a way to figure out how to get around these glitches in VLC. Do they even admit they are a bug?