Dpanther

Q: Play .mkv videos on a Powerbook G4?

I have a Powerbook G4 Titanium with a 1GHz processor, 512MB SDRAM and 64MB VRAM.

 

I have just upgraded from Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.4 and I'm just using this as a secondary computer for medial whatnots.

 

It took me awhile to even GET these .mkv videos onto this thing from my primary computer (Dropbox or CD-R ended up being my only two options because the USB 1.1 can't power my external HDD) but now I seem to be unable to even play these videos.

 

I am using an old archived version of VLC media player (up to date for the book) but it gives me the "your computer is too slow error", I can hear the sound and some video but it is tearing and all sorts of choppy.

 

 

 

SO! Does anyone know a way to get these .mkv's to play correctly? Or is this thing really "too slow"?

 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Dpanther

iPhone 4, Windows 7, 64bit

Posted on Jan 20, 2012 12:18 AM

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Q: Play .mkv videos on a Powerbook G4?

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  • by Dpanther,

    Dpanther Dpanther Jan 20, 2012 12:28 AM in response to Dpanther
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jan 20, 2012 12:28 AM in response to Dpanther

    And for comparison when I tried to do the same thing when I had 10.2 I couldn't even get a video to start - now I can actually play them with 10.4.11.

  • by old comm guy,

    old comm guy old comm guy Jan 20, 2012 8:27 AM in response to Dpanther
    Level 4 (2,244 points)
    Jan 20, 2012 8:27 AM in response to Dpanther

    You might try downloading Perian and installing it.  This free add-on has provided clean Flash playback on my machines and indicates compatibility with .mkv files.  It basically revs up QuickTime.  That being said, your 1 GHz TiBook might be marginal for playback even with Perian.

  • by MrAppleFanMan,

    MrAppleFanMan MrAppleFanMan Jan 20, 2012 10:34 PM in response to Dpanther
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Jan 20, 2012 10:34 PM in response to Dpanther

    Have you considered a Mac OS X 10.3 Panther installation as opposed to a Tiger install? Although with Panther, you will loose much application support for certain applications, in my opinion, the overall system performance with Panther as oppoed to Tiger on older machines such as your PowerBook is much better. The application support in Panther is much better, however, when compared with Jaguar. I'd also stick with VLC. Even when VLC gives the error mentioning the speed of your computer, you can usually still play a video if your processor is fast enough. Have you considered converting the video files to a lesser-quality format? A good online converter is convertfiles.com. The ffmpegx application is also pretty good if you want to do the conversion directly on your machine, however, I would not recommed it to you considering the speed of your PowerBook (the conversion process would take awhile). .mov files can usually play pretty well on older machines... Experiment with different file formats.

  • by Cattus Thraex,

    Cattus Thraex Cattus Thraex Jan 20, 2012 11:05 PM in response to Dpanther
    Level 4 (1,714 points)
    Notebooks
    Jan 20, 2012 11:05 PM in response to Dpanther

    I am afraid this is not the system, but hardware config, it is quite an old mac. Download VLC and test with various video formats. MKV (Matrioshka) is a format, which requires certain conditions to run decently. 512 MB is not very much, I do not remember if that model support 1 GB of RAM, if yes, put it if you want better performance.

    Panther may also be a solution, as someone suggests.