PM dual1.8GHz - Full HD Video?

Hey just a quick question...in your signature you state you have 2 WD Greens in the G5? You need faster RPM as 5400 isnt great at all.Id recommend the Caviar Blacks or the VelociRaptors (I use the Black 2TB Drives, they scream, and price/GB is much lower.) And by the way my G5 (4GB DDR 400MHz) DP1.8GHz runs 1080p HD fine. Just has to do with your graphics card I assume...

How much Free space is on the G5's HDD? Is the RAM Maxed? How many icons are on the Desktop? (each one slows down 10.5.x noticeably... well a dozen can.)

Oh and btw the WD Blacks are 7200RPM (they also have dual processors inside the drives, which gives them a huge boost of speed over the Blue (your standard 7200RPM) plus the Blacks have a 64MB collassal Cache. And the VelociRaptors...all I know is that theyre beast and at 10,000RPM, theres not much you cant do with those. (Like I said I use 2 Blacks. They scream, of course though Im sure SSD is much faster, I think it would be interesting to see how well a VelociRapter keeps up with an SSD)

Home Page: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/desktop/

Caviar Blue: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=110

Caviar Black: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=100

VelociRaptor: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=20

I think that the VelociRaptors are the best drives out there but $/GB is too high so me and 600GB Max isnt the way I roll. I like Collassal drives. So I know I won't ever fill them up. The only computer in my house with less than 1TB internally is my MacBook (750GB WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 16MB Cache)

Youre probably wondering why I am only using WD, but I dont know if you already know but Western Digital makes THE BEST and MOST RELIABLE HDDs hands down. Never had any fail me (lol I still have 6GB and 10GB WDs chillen around the house and they still work like a charm.I dont use them though. Too small.) Ive had too many bad experinces with Seagate and Samsung especially so Id stay far far away from them.

Yeah, I think that little RAM has a lot to do with it... Geez, 10 GB on my G5/Quad running 10.5.8 will still run low! 😟

But Many "Green" drives will Sleep on their own, and/or have variable spindle speed... that you have no control over.

The 1.8 GHz processor is too weak for 720p or 1080p HD video.

I would expect marginal to poor playback with 720p and expect poor to no playback with 1080p.

Adding green drives to the mix further complicates and exacerbates the playback difficulties.

Green drives have NO purpose in a performance situation, which HD requires.

They are backup and archive drives, not boot nor scratch drives.

The 1.8 GHz processor is too weak for 720p or 1080p HD video.

He has a dual, though. I can play 720p just fine on my dual 1.5 GHz G4 with either VLC or Quicktime/Perian.

I also have a Green drive in my G4. It's one of the older EADS models, but it's plenty fast enough for watching video.

I've never been able to play 1080p without dropping frames, though. If there is any chance play 1080p on a dual 1.8, I suspect it would be with CorePlayer.

japamac wrote:

Adding green drives to the mix further complicates and exacerbates the playback difficulties.

Green drives have NO purpose in a performance situation, which HD requires.

They are backup and archive drives, not boot nor scratch drives.

Completely AGREED. My links even prove our points. The best drives for performance (rotational wise) are the Blacks (I have 2 and they work amazing wonders HUGE difference) The Blues are just your mainstream industry standard 7200RPM Drives.

Swampus wrote:

I also have a Green drive in my G4. It's one of the older EADS models, but it's plenty fast enough for watching video.

Ok, thats your G4 and if Greens were actually as "good" as you say they are, then Manufacturers would be using them over Blues. And I dont see that happening. AND, it doesnt matter about the speed in a G4 because the IDE Buses in the G4s (max of ATA133) is the bottleneck anyway.

I didn't say that. Black drives are far superior. I have both. I'm saying that I can't imagine ANY modern hard drive being the limiting factor in this particular case.

Swampus wrote:

I didn't say that. Black drives are far superior. I have both. I'm saying that I can't imagine ANY modern hard drive being the limiting factor in this particular case.

Ok modern or not its still 5400RPM (explains why laptops are usually sluggish thats why I have a 7200RPM WD Scorpio Black 750GB in mine) His video without a doubt I can almost PROMISE him that his video would playback better with a Blue even but I CAN PROMISE that his video will play much much much better if not flawlessy with a Black simply due to the entire system will run far faster with a Black.

I'll suggest this for VLC:

1) Use version 1.1.12 for now. The newest version 2.0 has some Altivec code disabled until they get some bugs worked out. That's a HUGE hit to performance.

2) Go to Preferences > Input & Codecs and look toward the bottom for "Skip the loop filter for H.264 decoding". Select "All" and click save. Then quit & restart.

3) Go to Preferences and click the "All" radio button in the bottom left corner. Then go to Input / Codecs > Access modules > file and increase the top setting (Caching value ms) to 3000 or so. Click save.

Matthew Knice wrote:

Swampus wrote:

I didn't say that. Black drives are far superior. I have both. I'm saying that I can't imagine ANY modern hard drive being the limiting factor in this particular case.

Ok modern or not its still 5400RPM (explains why laptops are usually sluggish thats why I have a 7200RPM WD Scorpio Black 750GB in mine) His video without a doubt I can almost PROMISE him that his video would playback better with a Blue even but I CAN PROMISE that his video will play much much much better if not flawlessy with a Black simply due to the entire system will run far faster with a Black.

No. Again, I agree that the Black is a fine drive, but the primary reason for this isn't even the maximum sustained read and writes. A Black drive can improve performance in a lot of ways, but even the fasted HD in the world isn't going to make a difference when the CPU is choking on the bitrate. Just look at the CPU use when you're playing 720p or 1080p on a PowerPC. Since you bring it up, I've never even encountered a laptop 5400 RPM drive that couldn't handle the bitrate for HD video. I use one for this in an external Firewire enclosure.

Swampus wrote:

Matthew Knice wrote:

Swampus wrote:

I didn't say that. Black drives are far superior. I have both. I'm saying that I can't imagine ANY modern hard drive being the limiting factor in this particular case.

Ok modern or not its still 5400RPM (explains why laptops are usually sluggish thats why I have a 7200RPM WD Scorpio Black 750GB in mine) His video without a doubt I can almost PROMISE him that his video would playback better with a Blue even but I CAN PROMISE that his video will play much much much better if not flawlessy with a Black simply due to the entire system will run far faster with a Black.

No. Again, I agree that the Black is a fine drive, but the primary reason for this isn't even the maximum sustained read and writes. A Black drive can improve performance in a lot of ways, but even the fasted HD in the world isn't going to make a difference when the CPU is choking on the bitrate. Just look at the CPU use when you're playing 720p or 1080p on a PowerPC. Since you bring it up, I've never even encountered a laptop 5400 RPM drive that couldn't handle the bitrate for HD video. I use one for this in an external Firewire enclosure.

Ok and yeah the CPU might be sluggish, however though his RAM should be increased. I play HD video on my G5 just fine and I still have the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 GPU. I have 4GB of RAM and DP 1.8GHz. It runs fine IF on the Hard Drive or External drive. NOT so much with Wi-Fi though 😉 but yeah. Thats Wi-Fi. And as for the 5400RPM laptop drive thing I meant Windows for the most part and its slowER than 7200RPM with Windows (I run Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit on my MacBook via Boot Camp) It was much slower with the original 250GB 5400RPM WD Blue drive (lol Apple even uses WD Drives, well my G5 shipped with a Seagate...but thats irrevelent due to its age.)

But anyway the bottom line is...putting a Black in that machine of his will definitely HELP his video playback.

Heh. Oh yeah, RAM. That's probably an important factor here, as BDAqua noted.

So, you can play 1080p on your dual 1.8GHz without dropping any frames? What are you using for your player and what is your CPU load if you don't mind my asking? I'm not sure if it's going to be possible on my G4 except maybe with CorePlayer.