The VideoLAN Forums

Hi i have an old G3 400mhz that i use as a media center. it's got a radeon 7000 64mb videocard in it and also 512mb of memory. for certain divx encoded movies it will lag occasionally. i was wondering if upgrading the memory will help smooth it along or am i SOL with the slow 400mhz processor?

oh and sorry i forogot to mention that its running on os 10.3.6 and running the latest vlc 8.0 release.

More RAM won't help you. Your processor is just to slow. You might consider to buy a CPU-upgrade-card, if one for your Mac exists.

Btw. It might difficult for your Mac to access more than 512 MB RAM, because of its limited architecture, but I'm not entirely sure about that. More than 1024 MB can't be accessed in any case.

Hey!
I have exactly the same setup except I'm now running OS X 10.3.7.
I do also have the same problem with performance on "heavier" video files. I do understand the problem is with the processor speed. However I also beleive it has to do with Mac OS X requiring "a lot of juice".

Just for testing I installed VLC on a (somewhat similar to our G3s I'd say) Pentium II machine with 192 MB RAM, a GeForce 2 MX 400 card with 32 MB RAM runnnig Windows XP SP2.

A movie file that my G3 couldn't handle played flawlessly on the above PC...