Watching video in VirtualPC 7?

[Thomas S]

Right now I've a PowerMac G5 with 512mb RAM(I kept putting off upgrading it), and I just purchased Virtual PC because I need to use Windows Media Player 10 for licensed media (ugh!).

Anyhow, video lags like crazy. But, my question is this - will more RAM allow me to watch videos without these problems? I'm gonna get it anyways, but I need to know whether it will affect it.

 

[Soulstorm]

Right now I've a PowerMac G5 with 512mb RAM(I kept putting off upgrading it), and I just purchased Virtual PC because I need to use Windows Media Player 10 for licensed media (ugh!).

Anyhow, video lags like crazy. But, my question is this - will more RAM allow me to watch videos without these problems? I'm gonna get it anyways, but I need to know whether it will affect it.

Actually, more ram will help, but you must also set in VPC preferences how much ram your virtual machine will occupy.

BTW, windows media player 10 is a very crappy program, its requirements are inexplicably high, even when used for PC's.

 

[MisterMe]

Right now I've a PowerMac G5 with 512mb RAM(I kept putting off upgrading it), and I just purchased Virtual PC because I need to use Windows Media Player 10 for licensed media (ugh!).

Anyhow, video lags like crazy. But, my question is this - will more RAM allow me to watch videos without these problems? I'm gonna get it anyways, but I need to know whether it will affect it.

My guess is that a Mac with only 512 MB is woefully inadequate for VPC running WinXP and WMP 10. The trick is to keep VPC out of MacOS X virtual memory and WinXP out of VPC virtual memory. My own machine has 1 GB. The sweet spot on it is a setting for Total RAM in PC: of 480 MB. Any setting higher causes VPC to excessively access MacOS X virtual memory. Try setting Total RAM in PC: to about half of the physical RAM on your computer. Adjust it up and down to find the setting that yields maximum performance.

 

[joecool85]

More RAM will definetly help. I would add another 512 or so at least.

 

[alex_ant]

I will be the dissenting opinion and say that adding more RAM will not help one bit with video lagginess. Video playback in VPC is almost exclusively CPU-bound. It's not like WMP10 is loading the whole video off the hard drive and playing it from RAM - it's streaming it off the disk in chunks and playing back the chunks, freeing the played chunks from memory as it goes along. So there is no reason why adding more RAM would change anything. If you notice the hard drive light in VPC blinking a lot while the video is playing, then perhaps suspect swapping which would mean that I'm wrong, otherwise, sorry dude.

 

[Malus]

I think you can only set virtual pc's ram setting to 512. So even if you have 2 GB of ram, its still gonna run slow.

 

[Thomas S]

I will be the dissenting opinion and say that adding more RAM will not help one bit with video lagginess. Video playback in VPC is almost exclusively CPU-bound. It's not like WMP10 is loading the whole video off the hard drive and playing it from RAM - it's streaming it off the disk in chunks and playing back the chunks, freeing the played chunks from memory as it goes along. So there is no reason why adding more RAM would change anything. If you notice the hard drive light in VPC blinking a lot while the video is playing, then perhaps suspect swapping which would mean that I'm wrong, otherwise, sorry dude.

Its not the CPU. Its a DP (not core) PowerMac 2.0ghz G5. I know that its single threaded and all, but still....

Anyhow, with Aperture coming I've ordered another two gigabytes of RAM (obviously Virtual PC only accesses 512mb).

Oh yeah - the vids I use it for are streamed off the internet at 420 bits/second. Wish I could lower that because the lesser quality stuff works fine

 

[generik]

Right now I've a PowerMac G5 with 512mb RAM(I kept putting off upgrading it), and I just purchased Virtual PC because I need to use Windows Media Player 10 for licensed media (ugh!).

Anyhow, video lags like crazy. But, my question is this - will more RAM allow me to watch videos without these problems? I'm gonna get it anyways, but I need to know whether it will affect it.

Nothing to do with ram, the emulated graphics card in VPC doesn't support directdraw i think... for that same reason you can't play any 3D games in VPC too.

Moral of story, don't buy "licensed" or "trusted" or "DRMed" media. Go tell 10 of your friends to that effect.

 

[matticus008]

Its not the CPU. Its a DP (not core) PowerMac 2.0ghz G5. I know that its single threaded and all, but still....

It is the CPU. That is, the software emulated CPU in VPC. It doesn't matter what kind of system you have, it's still going to suck. VirtualPC has to emulate the CPU hardware by converting instructions on the fly, and it has to emulate the graphics hardware, too. Like generik said, you've got no acceleration or DirectDraw/Direct3D support in VirtualPC because it would be too resource intensive.

I don't know if you remember the 2MB PCI video card days, but those video cards are better than what VirtualPC makes available to you. More RAM will help you in your Macintosh applications, but it's not going to do you any good in VPC. Your solution would be to find a different source for those videos or to play them on a machine with WMP 10 (a Windows PC).

 

[BornAgainMac]

Memory won't help. I dropped the Virtual PC file into a Mac ram disk and gave it the maximum memory of 512. Windows was running 100% in memory including the swap file. I even switched it down to 256 of dedicated Windows memory because I read that Virtual PC works best at 256 instead of 512. The video jerkyness seems to be video card related. If you can have native Mac video card support in VPC then it probably would solve the problem.

Microsoft Money works fast at least.