Curious about CPU or bandwidh requirement for playing VC-1

[jongampark]

Hello.

Thank you for the great program, VLC.
I have used the VLC for more than 5 years happily on my Mac and Windows machine.

Recently I started being curious on the VC-1 (WMV3). If I play a comparable video file on my iMac G4 1Ghz machine with 756MB of RAM, it is very slow. It usually drops frames, and i can't watch video file encoded using the WMV3/VC-1.
I thought that it was because there is not enough optimization done for the PowerPC G4 processors yet. (When MS announced the WMV3 at first, playing such a clip on my ThinkPad R32 was very slow, too. )

However, I recently played similar video clip on a MacBook 2.0Ghz base model. It was very plausible to watch video on the MacBook.
Well, yes. The MacBook is 2.0Ghz and it is a dual core, while my iMac G4 is 1Ghz and a single core.

Is it because of the new CPU? Or the system bus bandwidth also plays role there?
On my iMac G4, there is no problem watching video files encoded in Xvid, DivX, and so on. They have comparable width*height to that of VC-1/WMV3 encoded file. It is quite fast to decode Xvid, DivX-encoded files on the iMac G4.

I'm just curious....

Thank you.

[thresh]

cant say for "system bus", but VC-1 is very CPU-hungry.