Switching woes

[Bran]

I recently switched to an iBook 800G4 with all the bells and whistles. 10.3 is great the laptop itself is great on battery time and rock stable (the OS is stable, some software aren't since they are betas). Albeight G4 800 is much slower than my Athlon Tbird , gaming is impossible.

One of these software problems Im having is with Safari which works all well until after about 5 minutes of use, it seems like as if it cannot resolve DNS's for somereason, the status bar in the address bar stops at just beyond http:/ if you know what i mean. It doesn't advance, and this happens to all my tabs. The only way to make it load pages again is to quit and re-run. It's annoying. I'm finding myself liking IE more.

Problem #2 is non of my WMV's work. Period. Windows Media Player, worked fine for a few days and suddenly just quit on me. When opening any time of file (wmv, avi, mp3 whatever) it just says "Invalid stream type". I have tried searching everything with "Windows media" in the name and trashing + empting (including pref files what not, everything) and reinstalling it from scratch. Same thing. I want to use WMP because Neither VLC nor mplayer can handle wmv's worth a rat's ass (aka, skip and distortion, missing keyframes). I have a lot of music videos in WMV. Please help.

 

[kettle]

Sounds like the badgers have gone awol during the alphabetical woodland parade.

I'm sure some of the fine people here will advise a clean install quite soon.

 

[7on]

Hmmmm,Empty Safari's cache (delete it from ~/LIBRARY/caches/Safari/ rather than the menu bar)

Download WMP9 from microsoft.com and install that.

 

[Bran]

Reinstall OSX

Definitely not going to do that, I didn't leave windows just to reinstall OSX every second week.

Originally posted by 7on
Hmmmm,Empty Safari's cache (delete it from ~/LIBRARY/caches/Safari/ rather than the menu bar)

Download WMP9 from microsoft.com and install that.

Solved: Nuked safari's cache by #rm -r *, works fine now, lightening fast loading times. I'll make a script to do this every boot. Thanks for the tip .
Unsolved: By WMP I do mean WMP9.

 

[alset]

Glad Safari is working out, now. WMP, on the other hand, has never been a great product on the Mac. I suggest testing out some alternative players, such as Video LAN Client or MPlayer. Both should handle WMV. WMP on a Mac is sort of like IE - almost no self-respecting geek on a PC uses IE because it's a weak product that only dominates because of M$'s position to push it. Serious users understand it's flaws and use Opera, Mozilla, etc.

Dan

 

[Bran]

i said I tried both vlc and mplayer, they are good for other videos but not wmv. from what i can see they can't handle wmv keyframes major distortions happen. i consider myself a pretty adept Wintel user, IE is very usable on windows if you run MyIE2 or something, it's compatible.

Having said that is there anything that would decode WMV to plain MPEG? mplayer is poor at playing the stuff on the fly but would mencoder be able to decompress the stuff? I wouldn't mind letting the stuff convert overnight.