DVD Player
I ranted about Panther's DVD player quite a bit in a previous article on the mini, and just as I expected, the issues I raised in that article have not been addressed by Tiger. Tiger's de-interlacer and scaler are absolutely horrible and unacceptable by today's standards. While I didn't conduct the same level of tests that I did for my review of the DVD player with the mini, all tests that I did run exhibited the same combing artifacts and poor scaler quality as I had seen in Panther. Given the fact that apparently many Mac users had complained about Panther's DVD player in the past, I'm quite surprised that it wasn't fixed in Tiger.CPU utilization doesn't appear to be fixed either; DVD playback on the Mac mini continues to eat up a minimum of 40% of the machine's CPU time. Although, I haven't seen it peak at 65% since the upgrade to Tiger.
iChat AV 3 & Quicktime 7
Both of these applications do receive extensive updates, but honestly, I've not used either enough to even begin to feel comfortable with posting my opinions of them. The support for the H.264 codec is extremely important and I'm hoping that it will live up to its hype in future usage models.iChat finally supports the display of multiple groups at the same time, instead of having to switch between groups to make them visible, which makes it a much more reasonable IM client.
I will do my best, if the desire is still there, to comment on these applications more in a future Mac article.
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elrolio - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
yayayayayaay, as a dual user myself (my baby the power pc is at home whilst im a gfx designer workin on a powerbook - mine and G5s - company) and im currently installing tiger all over the frikken office. cuz for mac, i AM an early adopter hahahaanyways yay for tiger goddamn its cool
/end fanboystuff
ailleur2 - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
I should mention that the quartz debug utility will only be accessible if you installed xcode2.And i forgot to mention that the xcode that comes with panther uninstalled itself w/o telling me (or i didnt see it anyway) and i was actually trying to understand why i couldnt compile anything in tiger.
Xcode 2 is free and available on the tiger install dvd.
randomman - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Ars Technica managed to enable quartz 2d extreme, its just not on by default (probably for a reason like left over bugs).ailleur2 - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Good reviewI find automator to be the potentialy greatest thing since sliced bread.
Heres a site that i would like to see grow so i post it where i can.
http://www.automatorworld.com/
It holds (or will hold, hopefuly) a bank of workload algorithms that you can download and execute.
Spotlight is nice, i actually find myself using it. At first i thought "what, this is the big thing tiger brings?" but its actually quite powerful and useful.
I find safari to be quicker in tiger and the rss support is great althout i have yet to find how to use it as an expandable bookmark like in firefox.
All this was done doing an "archive and upgrade" install of os 10.3.9 on an ibook 800mhz (g3) with only 384mb of ram.
Anand: you can enable quartz 2d extreme (i think) if your graphic card supports it. Do a spotlight search for quartz and run the quartz debug utility and check the menu to enable quartz 2d extreme. Cant test it myself as my ibook only has a mobility 7500.
Shortass - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Good article, even though I mostly just scanned through it before I head off to work. I definately wish I had the funds to invest in a nice G5 or a really nice Mac laptop, as I've used them since I was 5 (17 now). If only the hardware pricing was less steep...