h.264 in OS 9

h.264 requires very powerful CPU and GPU power, that no Mac OS 9 booting capable machine has. Unless you want something along the lines of 1 to 4 frames per minute, I wouldn't really consider it as a possibility.

Your Windows 95 machine with H.264 probably is some Pentium 2 Ghz or faster machine.

On the other hand Mac OS 9 is the only Mac operating system that gives you Indeo 3 and 5 support because the developers of Indeo stopped making their software after Mac OS 9 disappeared.

VirtualPC never really was meant for video performance. It barely has any audio performance let alone video.

Message was edited by: a brody

Try doing a general web search. I just spent 10 minutes looking out of curiosity, and failed to find one. h264 wasn't really introduced until 2003/2004 so it substantially post-dates the replacement of OS9 by OSX. When that occurs very few people invest the time and effort to code for an old OS, especially since the computing power required for h264 exceeds that provided on any computer until those manufactured well into the OSX era. I'd be interested to know if you find one but I think the bottom line answer is one doesn't exist for OS9.

H.264 is very demanding. Carrying it to its full capability it can compress a DVD to the size of a CD with very little loss in quality if the processor is able to do on the fly decompression. A G4 is not capable of doing that.

Incidentally a brody, what about playback? I know this is a bit OT but is h264 playback as demanding, or just the encoding? I know any video playback on a G3 is demanding, I'm just wondering about early to mid-generation G4s.

G4s have an advantage of being able to compute vectors much better than G3s with their Altivec technology. Unfortunately few companies optimized their code around Altivec. G5s, and Core2Duo Macs have a fully 64 bit processor with 64 bit buses to help with computation, raising the amount of addressing capacity well beyond the limit of 4 GB. The real bottleneck in G4s and G3s is the bus, which is still at 32 bit.

Here's the FAQ you might want to know about:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html

Thanks for the link a brody.

Out of curiosity I just did an h264 encode using FFMPEGX on my QS DP 800 of a short mp4 I already had. It didn't seem to take any longer to encode it to h264 than the original encode to xvid mp4 took. Jumping to and from scenes has a bit of hesitation but normal playback seems okay. Maybe it's the DP despite the slower CPUs.

Why not upgrade your G4 to 10.5? I'm running it on a G4 iMac and an iBook G4. Flash plays slow, by h.264 plays greay

10.5 won't install on his 700MHz machine.

I don't know if it did or not, but I do remember the original iChat AV requirements for video chat which used h264 did require dual processor G4s for 3 or more videochatters simultaneously. The dual processor 800 Mhz Mac doesn't support Leopard either, but h264 was available to Tiger users too.

Just my 2c worth,

h264 playback on my dual 1GHz G4, up to about 1100kb/s is good, 24 fps with no issues. If I go up to 1800-2000kb/s, audio starts to get choppy. This is under OSX 10.3 and QT7, with 2GB RAM and nothing else running. Reckon on a 700MHz/800MHz G4 to be half the speed of my PMG4 (My PMG4 takes exactly the same amount of time as my PBG4 @ 1.67GHz so half is about right for single CPU).

Like all the others have said, I really was surprised at the CPU requirements when I first started using h264.

Tiger, or Panther on your G4 would make the world of difference, for playback anyway. You could get pretty decent quality, 600kb/s or maybe more at 24fps. Do you have any control over what the video is encoded at ?

Encoding h264 on a G4 is as painful as it gets. About 12 hours computer time for 1 hour of video and audio at 1500kb/s. My Mac Pro can do the same encode in 6-7 minutes.

About 12 hours computer time for 1 hour of video and audio

Ack. That reminds me of when I used to do mp4 encoding of raw video on my G3 beige 266. It would take about 12 hours of completely locked up computer to do an hour of that, and that's at 320x240.

A 700MHz G4 is obviously a whole lot more capable than the 8500's original 120-180MHz PPC 604e. But the 8500 logic board's 50MHz (max) system bus is still there, choking the flow of data through the machine and the G4. And the 8500's 2MB or 4MB of VRAM...well, enough said about that. There's no comparison between a 1995 PM 8500 upgraded with a 700MHz G4 and a 2001 667MHz PM G4 with a 133MHz system bus and a six-years-newer graphics card with 16, 32 or 64MB of VRAM — never mind a newer, faster PM G4.

So even if a codec exists for h.264 in OS 9, any expectations about using it on an 8500 should be very, very low.