Just bought DP g4 - HD movies?

Hi all,

I recently purchased a Power Mac G4 dual processor 867Mhz MDD.
I will be throwing in a 250GB HD as the main drive , a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB graphics card, a USB 2.0 card and a DL Pioneer DVD burner.

It will be running 10.5, the new graphics card should help as it supports core image. Its main uses will just be the general web, word processing, downloading etc. But I will be burning a fair amount of DVDs with it and also watching movies (some of them HD).

The question i have for you all is how do you think this machine will run HD movies 720p and 1080p and also encoding video with toast etc.

I can't wait to get it up and running.

Thanks for your time.

Pattay

Where do you find HD movies? DVD's are SD, iTunes is SD.
I had a dual 1GHz and didn't find it to be very fast at all. I would expect some playback issues if you're going to be watching 720p content. Maybe if you do absolutely nothing else while watching a video playback will be ok, otherwise, forget it.

The only 1080p HD I have is a couple of trailers from Apple. They jerk and drop frames on any G4 I have tried them on. My AMD 64 3200 Plus with XP still drops frames. My Intel Mini plays them back without one dropped frame and very smooth. The G4 I have here is a 1.8Ghz with ATI radeon 9800 Pro.

My iMac G5 2.1 Ghz plays them back quite smooth.

Ah ok, no worries. I dont really watch that much HD stuff its more DVDs, mpeg4s etc.

And its irrelevant where I get them from.

You guys reckon it will be fine with encoding video. The apps I mainly use for that will be visual hub and toast.


Thanks again all!

It will encode videos with VH and toast just fine, but do know it will take a while with the CPU that comes with the machine. Toast is a bit slow even on my C2D Intel Mac when Toast has to convert the video before burning. VH is a lot faster in the conversion process.

ok cool. Yeah i have found toast tediously slow even on my MBP C2D. VH is much faster, I just do alot of .avi and .mpeg to DVD encodes so then i can burn it quickly with disk utility instead of waiting like 1hr+ for toast to encode and burn.

thanks for all your help dtravis7, im looking forward to firing up this MDD g4.
I have used one b4 with everything stock except 2GB ram and it ran great with tiger.

Hopefully my upgraded one will do the same with 10.5.

All the best. Go the apples!

Pattay