Re: [gentoo-sparc] Myth/DVD/MAME on an Ultra5?

[Oliver M A Wilson]

On 15:50 Mon 09 Oct     , Jack Lloyd wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 04:55:52PM +0000, Oliver M A Wilson wrote:
> >     What is the clock speed on the cpu? I have never tried DVD/TV on my
> > 333Mhz Ultra5 but DivX playback was awful, it can just almost cope with
> > full screen mpeg playback. I think these machines just aren't powerful
> > enough to cope with modern media apps.
>
> 333 here as well. Was that with the onboard video? I'm wondering if with
> a more modern card it can offload more work from the CPU (also I think MPEG-4
> is more CPU intensive than MPEG-2, though I'm sure even that will be a strain
> for this old thing).
>
> >     By the way, is it the IDE controller that sucks? I always put the crap
> > hard drive performance down the fact they are 5400rpm disk.
>
> Yeah, the driver has a comment describing the chipset as "broken by
> design". No DMA! I've got a 7200 RPM ATA/66 drive in there now and
> it's only marginally better. Guess Sun didn't want to canabalize sales
> of the Ultra2 by giving the 5 decent I/O throughput.
>
> -Jack
> --
> gentoo-sparc@g.o mailing list

Jack,
    That was with the onboard video (less than brilliant). I don't think
much video decompression would be done on the graphics card. An upgrade
(more video ram) would mean that you could run it at higher resolutions
with higher colour depths and refresh rates though. Another thing I never
figured out (didn't spend much time trying to admitedly) was the sound
output at the back? If you go ahead with this and it works do let me know
as I have got 2 of these things and I am struggling to find a use for them.
    Regards,
        Oliver Wilson 


-- 
gentoo-sparc@g.o mailing list