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PowerPC Media Center 7.2.6 Intel Edition For Tiger Comes With One Of The Best Video Players For Intel Tiger

alex_free

alex_free

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 24, 2020
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I just released PPCMC 7.2.6, and I have made the first ever native Intel build of PowerPC Media Center 7. I had to figure out myself how to fix FFmpeg to compile on Mac OS X 10.4 Intel (PowerPC was just fine). And then... I got all x86 assembly optimizations enabled in the FFmpeg/FFplay and Panther_SDL2 builds. I threw a modern 1080p H.264 MKV with high bitrate at the Mac Mini Core2Duo 2.0 GHZ - 1GB RAM - Mac OS X 10.4.11 and it ran perfect. So did 720p YouTube streaming.

There does seem to be some kind of issue if surround sound audio is in videos. But using the PPCMC 7.2.6 "Open Media File" option to play a video in FFplay gets you an insane amount of performance with modern video codec support on Intel Tiger.
 
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Sadly it crashes shortly after launch on both 10.6 and 10.7. Just beach balls forever. The ppc version somewhat works on 10.6 as in downloading videos seems to work. Any idea why the intel build wont run on 10.6+?

Cheers
 
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MysticCow said:
I wonder how far up the MacOS/macOS ladder this app can go.
Click to expand...
I can see it now... PowerPC Media Center 7 ARM edition
?

Realistically though, I'm going to do a Leopard or Snow Leopard release that will work on 10.6-10.14 possibly. The tiger build runs fantastic on the Macbook Pro 17" 2.93GHz 8GB RAM 500GB SSD running Mac OS X 10.5.6. But it will not work on anything higher then 10.5.8 because if Panther_SDL2. However with 10.6 i think i can just compile the standard SDL2 releases.
 
wicknix said:
Sadly it crashes shortly after launch on both 10.6 and 10.7. Just beach balls forever. The ppc version somewhat works on 10.6 as in downloading videos seems to work. Any idea why the intel build wont run on 10.6+?

Cheers
Click to expand...
Interesting, nothing works? I knew for a fact that 10.6 wouldnt entirely work because of Panther_SDL2, nothing compiled with it will run on higher then 10.5.8.

A Snow Leopard build is whats needed for 10.6-10.14. I can just use regular SDL2 AFAIK and not have any problems. This was actually planned, but PPCMC 7.2.5 came out 6 months ago and I had to cut down on alot of things i wanted in 7.2.6.

7.2.7 has the Snow Leopard build planned along with a replacement for GIT using curl and unzip to drasticly cut down size (Like 400MBs is just GIT).
 
If you can pull it off it'd be cool. I recently released TenSixTube for quick & lightweight YT on 10.6-10.14. Otherwise i still use the viewtube script via grease monkey to download audio/video, so no rush. Was more interested in the twitch streaming aspect on 10.6 vs having to install macports to build mpv, gnutls, etc.

Cheers
 
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wicknix said:
If you can pull it off it'd be cool. I recently released TenSixTube for quick & lightweight YT on 10.6-10.14. Otherwise i still use the viewtube script via grease monkey to download audio/video, so no rush. Was more interested in the twitch streaming aspect on 10.6 vs having to install macports to build mpv, gnutls, etc.

Cheers
Click to expand...
Will for sure look into it, I can see the use case as well.

By the way, what do you think of the new build system in 7.2.6? You might get a kick out of reading it.
 
I bet it has to do with me running a squid proxy on both snow and lion then. Its needed for mail and other webkit based software to work / display properly. I ran in to this issue before with youtube-dl awhile back.
 
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wicknix said:
I bet it has to do with me running a squid proxy on both snow and lion then. Its needed for mail and other webkit based software to work / display properly. I ran in to this issue before with youtube-dl awhile back.
Click to expand...
It makes sense that everything except ffplay would work. 10.14 running 10.4 binaries, that's some impressive backward compatibility.
 
alex_free said:
I just released PPCMC 7.2.6, and I have made the first ever native Intel build of PowerPC Media Center 7. I had to figure out myself how to fix FFmpeg to compile on Mac OS X 10.4 Intel (PowerPC was just fine). And then... I got all x86 assembly optimizations enabled in the FFmpeg/FFplay and Panther_SDL2 builds. I threw a modern 1080p H.264 MKV with high bitrate at the Mac Mini Core2Duo 2.0 GHZ - 1GB RAM - Mac OS X 10.4.11 and it ran perfect. So did 720p YouTube streaming.

There does seem to be some kind of issue if surround sound audio is in videos. But using the PPCMC 7.2.6 "Open Media File" option to play a video in FFplay gets you an insane amount of performance with modern video codec support on Intel Tiger.
Click to expand...

For the purpose I use PPCMC (or, uh, IMC), downloading clips from YT in highest available quality, it appears to work fine on my A1261 running 10.6.8.
 
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Haven't gotten to try this out on Intel Tiger yet due to not being able to find recovery DVDs for my 2006 C2D MBP, but I did try it out on SL on the same Mac and I was able to stream video in QuickTime.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
archive.org

Apple MacBook Pro (Late-2006) Software Install and Restore Discs (Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger) : Apple Inc. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

These are the installation/recovery CDs for late-2006 MacBook Pros. These install Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger.These are not retail or universal discs. They will...
archive.org
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I tried that one already and while I was able to mount the image for disc 1, I couldn't restore it to an external drive or burn it to a DVD+R DL blank. Downloading was very slow going from archive.org too, so possibly maybe something got messed up the in the download process and the image is actually fine. So I might try it again or just keep holding out for a physical copy on eBay.
 
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Specs:
Mac Mini Early 2007 (maxed-out)
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz
Intel GMA 950
4GB RAM
500GB SSD
Mac OS X 10.4.11

Benchmark:
720p YouTube Stream (high bitrate very recent upload)
30.8% CPU usage
Sub 5 seconds from PPCMC.app to streaming

Picture 2.png
 
Last edited:
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I think you know your audience. Solid Users Guild.

2009 MBP 2gig 10.6.8

Rolled my own Mplayer and off the the 720p races. Much better than stock browser youtube or my crippled MPV.
 
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I finally got around to buying the recovery discs for my MBP and I am now running Tiger on here. It is running really nice! I tried PPCMC 7.2.6 Intel, but unfortunately I got this error message. It happens whether I try to use ffplay or QuickTime to stream a video.

Picture 1.png
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
I finally got around to buying the recovery discs for my MBP and I am now running Tiger on here. It is running really nice! I tried PPCMC 7.2.6 Intel, but unfortunately I got this error message. It happens whether I try to use ffplay or QuickTime to stream a video.

View attachment 1946845
Click to expand...
Is this after a fresh install? The update function is broken only on Intel and may cause this, an update is due out soon.
 
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