Quoting shreeswifty bigswift@ufl.edu:
ok thisis a little OT, but what DATA RATE are folks using for smooth playing movies?
I recall from the installation i was running a G5, with like 4- 8GB movies playing very smoothly on my laptop of course is a bit stuttery. i have been dumping out of final cut as DV-NTSC
Sorenson3 lets me tweal Data Rate but at picture cost.
any tips or hints?
DV NTSC is pretty lightweight, and I found that my Tibook could do 3 streams pretty well but the fourth one started to hit the limit of the ard drive. The main drawback to DV is that it is limited to 720x480 or 720x576 only. Photo-jpeg has very nice image quality for a lossy codec, has fast decompression and can be any dimension. I think the new HD codecs included with FCP HD look fantastic and the 720p will play on my Tibook just fine. A G5 will like any of these just fine - uncompressed files are usually not worth the trade-off in massive disk resources required for their playback.
The codecs to avoid are Sorenson, H.26x, Divx and anything MPEG as those have very high compression rates and many use interframe compression (keyframes) which are not friendly to random access playback. Anything you commonly encounter on the web is not well suited for realtime use.
cgc
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