Review:

Unlike the web page at sonnet tells you this is NOT a plug and play piece of hardware with no software needed. You must have at least Mac OS 10.3.5, must have firmware 4,2,8 or higher and must install a firmware patch BEFORE your motherboard can even see the CPU. Rather than backup my Amiga and reformat with 10.3.5 I found a spare 40gb ide lying around and installed Mac OS onto it. Saved a lot of time.

I bought this to play HD video (h.264) which includes blueray and YoutTube Hd videos.
It is a failure.
The failure seems more to do with MPlayer than the processor. Everyone on the internet moans about h.264 including windows and linux people. They fixed their problem by using a different library than ffmpeg. Something called avcore or something like that which is much faster. Basically , even at 1ghz I could play HD but the audio was always out of sync and got the message "your CPU is too slow". B elieve it or not I still get that message and CPU usage goes to 100% playing a 1280x720 video from YouTube. Even out of a ramdisk.

On the other hand, I must say that the new speed makes this Power Mac feel like a modern PC. Everything is instantaneous. The graphics on the desktop are rendered like a modern machine. It really helped speed up the rendering to the video card.

Copying over USB goes much faster also. Dir Opus 4.18 PPC is working much faster.

I have been able to use Tubexx to dumb down some of the videos to DIVX 720x576 and they play well, but some os the videos still don't play right. The video portion runs out of control.


I guess the only cure is to get a different library just for h.264.

You're not very clear about your tests. We don't know what OS you're referring to (OSX? Linux? MorphOS?).

For the record, my Mac mini @1.42GHz plays most of my H264 720p files correctly on MorphOS with MPlayer (the same isn't true on OSX). And when bitrate is a bit too demanding, using skiploopfilter option is enough.


[ Edited by Fab on 2010/11/20 20:01 ]

> even at 1ghz I could play HD but the audio was always out of sync
> and got the message "your CPU is too slow".

The reason your audio got out of sync was actually because your HD video was played too slow due to lack of processing power at 1 GHz.

> B elieve it or not I still get that message and CPU usage
> goes to 100% playing a 1280x720 video from YouTube.

Strange. Others have reported here on MorphZone that their 1.8 GHz G4 can play 720p Youtube videos at 90% workload on average.

If you can play HD / Blueray videos please post your revision/date of MPlayer and your hardware specs.

How much RAM do you have ?

> If you can play HD / Blueray videos please post your revision/date
> of MPlayer and your hardware specs.

I can play some H264 videos at 720p (16:9 aspect ratio), some I can't. Depends on things like bitrate and usage of loopfilter options.

* Mac mini G4 1.5 GHz
* MPlayer 1.0 (20.07.10) © MPlayer Team, Nicolas Det, Fabien Coeurjoly [SVN: r31757]