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What have you done with a PowerPC today?

For the first time ever, I got Viewtube and VLC to play nice. Sure, it was in Lubuntu 16.04, and it was mostly to deal with the fact that videos played with wrong colors otherwise, but having real, proper Youtube running on my G4 MDD feels like an achievement to me. Yes, I'm limited to 480p, but considering the screen it's connected to maxes out at around 1280x960, 480p is absolutely fine.
 
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I did a little web browsing on my Powerbook the other night. Web browsing on the old Powerbook is really quite bearable when you're blocking ads and connected via ethernet as opposed to wifi. Word 2008 is a bit of a joy to use on the Powerbook too. It reads and renders properly everything that I create in Microsoft 365.
 
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I use more my retro Mac computers than the new computers. For daily stuff i use my iMac mid 2007 and a Windows 10 PC. Just to check some news or pay a bill or buy something or download retro stuff. Every day i turn on my Performa 6116CD or my Power Macintosh G3 Minitower and run games. Below the specification:

Macintosh Performa 6116CD: PowerPC 60 mhz, Sonnet G3 NuBus accelerator card at 500 mhz installed, 136mb ram, 73gb hard drive, Apple 4x cd rom drive, Apple 8100 4mb video card, Roland MT32, Roland Sound Canvas SC88.

Power Macintosh G3 Minitower: PowerPC G3 at 300mhz, 768mb ram, 120gb hard drive, Dvd drive, ATI Radeon 7000 Mac edition 32mb video card, Roland Sound Canvas SC88.

The following are in my basement because there is no room in my house:

Powermac G4 MDD
iMac G3
(Another) Power Macintosh G3 Minitower
Powerbook 540c (Motorola cpu)
Macintosh LC 475 (Motorola cpu)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Just hooked up my DVD recorder to my camcorder's AV input and turned on AV-DV passthrough. Doesn't work with iMovie 06 but 08 as shown here is fine (as is 11 on Snow Leopard).
Click to expand...

I just retried this using Vidi.

Download Vidi for Mac | MacUpdate

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It displays the DV feed from the camera just fine but recording fails (it works using iMovie).
 
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Did quite a few things with my PowerPC Macs recently. Decided that my 1.5ghz Sawtooth is safe to use again, so I turned it on for the first time in months and updated TFF and PPCMC. I then booted into OS 9 and did some experimenting with the XLR8 InterView again. I discovered that Strata VideoShop 4.5 is the only program that fully works with the InterView. Final Cut Pro 3 and iMovie 2 don’t even know it exists and Premiere 6.5 will record footage from the InterView, but the resulting recordings are only 2 seconds long and over a GB in size. Premiere can’t see any video coming through the InterView without recording.

The video from the InterView was glitchy when using the InterView on the Sawtooth until I remembered that time I discovered that turning down the Mac’s resolution solved an audio problem I had in Apple DVD Player. Going back to Strata VideoShop and turning the Sawtooth’s resolution down from 1280x1024 (the highest resolution my monitor supports) to 800x600, I got stable video at a good frame rate. I did have to turn the digitizing window down to 320x240 since 640x480 was still producing some glitchiness, though not as much as before. Recording went smoothly too, though I don’t know if I turned off compression or what because the resulting file was over 3 GB for a 5-minute recording.

I did an internal SSD upgrade to my 700mhz iBook G3. The internal HDD works fine, but I wanted more space. I bought a Zheino 120GB mSATA SSD and an mSATA to laptop IDE Adapter + enclosure from Amazon. Installation went okay, though I had to widen the hole in the enclosure where the IDE cable goes in because the hole wasn’t wide enough. I used the knife from the iFixit toolkit I have to widen the opening. I removed the adapter from the enclosure prior to performing surgery on the enclosure. Disk Utility on the Tiger Install DVD recognized the SSD without issue and I was able to format and partition it without issue. I restored Tiger onto the iBook via a DMG I made of the Tiger install from the old drive. Prior to performing the SSD upgrade, I hooked up the iBook to my MBP via TDM and used Snow Leopard’s disk utility to make DMGs of the Tiger and OS 9 installations I had on there and put those DMGs onto an external FireWire drive. Restoration was successful. I then restored the OS 9 DMG to the dedicated OS 9 partition I made on the SSD and while the restoration was successful, it appears that using Snow Leopard’s Disk Utility (though this possibly could happen with other versions of Disk Utility too) caused program icons to disappear in the OS 9 image. I ended up re-installing OS 9 from scratch once I booted into my newly restored Tiger. I reinstalled OS 9 using the netboot DMG.

I put the iBook’s old 60 GB 5400 RPM HDD into my PDQ. OS 9 on this 5400 RPM drive boots up faster than OS 9 on the old 4 GB OEM HDD the PDQ had. That HDD worked fine, but I wanted the PDQ to have a faster drive and more space. While I was happy with OS 9’s performance on the PDQ, I decided to put 8.6 on the PDQ again because it is something that the other Macs in my collection can’t run. The PDQ is now the only Mac in my collection that still boots from a mechanical hard drive, though I may give it an SSD upgrade in the future.
 
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I've done most things on my PPC Macs (specifically my iBook G3 and PowerBook G4) since Thursday. I can say that it has been a really pleasant experience and I can't say I'm missing any of my Intel machines for much.

I can watch YouTube, browse the web, converse on Discord, and do a lot of other things that I can normally do.
 
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MacFoxG4 said:
I've always been interested in video capture, and I finally got to play around with it recently on my PPC Macs. I bought a device on eBay called the InterView, made by XLR8. It is a USB 1.1 video capture device and it came in the box with software and drivers. It is designed with OS 8.6 in mind, so I tried it on my PDQ first. Installation went smoothly, I installed the included Strata VideoShop 4.5 first and then the drivers for the InterView.

I tested the device out by hooking up a model 1 Sega Genesis and playing some Sonic 2. Watching the game on the screen was fine with a hint of slowdown here and there (though I think that normally happens with this game now that I think about it), though I did have to turn Virtual Memory off to get better performance. Recording the footage caused the footage to appear as a slide show on screen and made playing more difficult. The footage looked okay when I played it back though, low framerate, but better than it was. I eventually discovered that there are a ton of different compression options in VideoShop with varying results of quality. I haven't tried them all out, but so far I like the Component option the best. Learned that the sound in port works on my PDQ, first time I ever used it.

I then decided to test for OS 9 compatibility by installing VideoShop and the drivers on my iBook G3. Due to the lack of a sound in port on the iBook, I used an RCA to USB converter to get sound in. Installation went smoothly and when watching the game on screen I noticed the performance was better. Recording turned the image on screen into a slideshow though. When played back however, the footage looked great once I found a good compression method. When I tried to close the the recording I was watching, OS 9 froze. I am unsure if this was a coincidence or if there is some incompatibility between VideoShop and OS 9 since this didn't happen to me on OS 8.

OS X drivers do exist for the InterView, but I don't know which version of OS X they need or if they work with my version of the InterView, so I haven't tried them out.
Click to expand...

Amethyst1 said:
Good thinking, since that's where too much latency can kill you so to speak. :) As for OS X drivers, they seem to have been released in early 2002 so probably require 10.1.

www.mactech.com

XLR8 Releases InterView 2.0, First USB Analog Video Capture for X - MacTech.com

XLR8 Releases InterView 2.0 with OS X Support. =2E.the First Macintosh USB Analog Video Capture product for OS X=8A Atlanta, Georgia, April 16th, 2002: XLR8, a leading manufacturer of Macintosh upgrades and expansion products, today announced the shipping of InterView 2.0 with OS X support. Fi
www.mactech.com www.mactech.com
Click to expand...
Mine arrived in the mail today, aside from having low resolution it is possible to play games with, unlike my EyeTV 200 which has a 1-2 second delay.
I set up the InterView on a 600Mhz iMac G3 and plugged a gamecube into it. The only problem is the small window that doesn't get any better in full screen.
Installation was pretty easy, other than the fact that I had to track down a serial number for Strata Videoshop (even though mine was advertised as an "unopened box" it had everything in it except the serial, go figure. It appeared unopened, probably just resealed with plastic at one point)

I have been trying to hunt down the drivers for Mac OS X. I got this far on the internet archive. But as usual only the page as archived, not the file itself (PSA: If you're archiving something important, check the outlinks box or archive the link of the actual file).
If anyone happens to have the Mac OS X drivers for this thing I would like to see if performance is better on a USB 2.0 equipped G4 Mac under OS X.
@Amethyst1 as a side note, I hooked up the EyeTV 250 that came with my 200, to see if it would work with just the coax\RF on a VCR. Unfortunately the device isn't even recognized at all by the computer. I suspect it's either just dead or only initializes if it had the AV cable adapter which it didn't come with.
 
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Amethyst1 said:

Not the original drivers/software but said to be compatible with the InterView. I got an expired certificate warning which I ignored. :)
Click to expand...
Thanks! I'll give it a shot.
Looks like their cert expired last week. Whenever this happens I have to go into my router and disable squid otherwise it refuses to load even if I add an exception to the browser lol.
 
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Played around a bit today with MUI a bit more and created custom colors and modified button borders to match the "skin" i'm using on MorphOS. Not too dark, and not too light. I dig it.

g4minimos.png
 
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