[geeks] DVD playback on Solaris

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 12:45:25PM +1100, Charles Redmond wrote:
> Ok, so I'm now going to try to tackle my last reason
> for having a pc....
> I've got a nice U60 with an Elite 3D/Sol 8 and I have
> just won a SCSI dvd 
> on ebay.
> Does anyone have any experience on whether the Elite
> 3D will be good enough for DVD playback?
>  
> I've also got a U30 with a Creator (Not Creator 3D)
> and I'm assuming this will not be good enough. 
> Does this sound like  reasonable assumption?

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.