Playback help on G5, MKV, FrontRow and VLC

[ekim_seekem]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to brew this set up for awhile. What I have is this:

LG 240Hz HDTV 47”
Audio Receiver + speakers
Power Mac G5 dual 2.0 Ghz
- 4 GB Ram
- 2x 1TB SATA drives
- ATI x850 graphics card
HDMI -> DVI cable and an Optical Audio cable to the receiver
Remote system compatible with FrontRow

The first issue I’ve got is to get various movie formats to work on my G5, I have mostly .mp4 and .mkv videos with mixed quality, 720p seems to play fine no matter the format or player, but 1080p seems to be very hit or miss, especially if the file is over 5 GB and is MKV, video is choppy. Obviously FrontRow uses QT (I’ll get to that later), so I used VLC to play my high quality stuff, but 1080p MKV files play horribly, I’ve tried to convert these to mp4, but the quality seems to go down (with handbreak or MKVTools), I’ve resorted to converting them to AVI but I’ve heard this destroys audio quality.

I guess my question with that is; is my hardware too underpowered to handle MKV or is the file container/codec/encoder just that buggy?

My second question is with FrontRow, I’ve heard about some app that allows it to use VLC as a media player instead of Quicktime, but any search that I’ve done hasn’t turned up anything. I like the interface UI of FrontRow, just I’d rather use VLC then QuickTime to view videos.

If this can’t work, it’ll mean I’ll have to better equip Quicktime to play videos, would you guys recommend Perian or find and install codecs separately?