[geeks] DVD playback on Solaris

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
> Date: 2004/03/22 Mon PM 01:59:57 GMT
> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: Re: [geeks] DVD playback on Solaris


> I doubt that either video card will provide any
> meaningfull hardware acceleration (other than perhaps
> video scaling) for playing MPEG video. So, the issue 
> is what CPU(s) do you have.  I've heard some reports
> that say that 300mhz ones will do the job, and other
> reports have said that you will need 450mhz cpus to do
> the job.  I don't own anything near fast enough in the
> Sun world.  However, I found that on linux 350mhz P2s
> could keep up just fine with software decoding MPEG2
> DVDs, so I would be shocked if similar clock rate Sun
> chips wouldn't be much faster.

WinDVD (the only DVD-playback software I have any real exp. with) states 300 MHz CPU is a hard lower limit for their software decoding playaback software. I think one of the issues in DVD playback has to do with (what I'll call) the "slew rate" or the speed at which, at a basic level, the CPU can churn through the data. Another word might be throughput.

I've tried to play DVDs on a 266 MHz PII, and it was not pretty - going to a slightly higher clock speed made things much better.