Specked Out G3 Won't Play Videos

I've just purchased a lovely little refurb G3 for my 8 year old God Daughter to play with. It has a 500MHz processor, 512MB Ram and 80GB Hard Drive and is running 10.4.9 and all bang up to date iLife.

Most things run OK on it apart from video. I don't know what (if any) video card is in the thing? Would increasing the RAM help?

any ideas greatfully received

Greg

Well for one thing VRAM is 16 MB SGRAM in those models so it isn't much... :blind:

Reference: iMac (Summer 2001) G3/500, G3/600, G3/700.

It refuses to play any video at all, or drops frames on some videos?

The G3's usually came with a Radeon 7500 with 32MB VRAM, but this won't be your problem. Since 2001, video has become more and more compressed, requiring more and more processing power to decode it - @500mhz, your CPU is barely fast enough to decode simple MPEG2 movies, much less anything more sophisticated. If you're trying to decode h.264 (Quicktime/iTunes based video) you're going to really struggle to kee the frame rate above 10 - 15fps. As for any HD content, forget it.