So I get to play this weekend with a Mac Pro with a 2600XT video card, 4GB and one CPU installed (2.8GHz). Since I just disassembled my HTPC, I figured that I would try using Front Row in 10.5.3 as a substitute and if that worked maybe I would just connect my own Mac to the HDTV and use it.
I connected up the Mac Pro to my HDTV, the OS recognized the LCD and defaulted to 1300-something x 768 and I changed it to the native resolution (1920x1080/60p). FR is very slick and I like it a lot as a front end.
The problem is that the h.264 videos I made from DVDs (using Nero Recode, which has a licensed h.264 encoder) play back very badly under Front Row and Quicktime. The speed of the system should be way more than enough since the same videos play back smoothly on my junky 1.43GHz laptop with Intel X3100 video. I have encoded other videos in MPEG-4 AVC in lower resolutions with Nero Recode and those play back fine in Quicktime. Are there any tweaks to make h.264 playback better? I'm hoping the solution isn't to turn down the resolution back to somewhere around 720p because that's lame.
I connected up the Mac Pro to my HDTV, the OS recognized the LCD and defaulted to 1300-something x 768 and I changed it to the native resolution (1920x1080/60p). FR is very slick and I like it a lot as a front end.
The problem is that the h.264 videos I made from DVDs (using Nero Recode, which has a licensed h.264 encoder) play back very badly under Front Row and Quicktime. The speed of the system should be way more than enough since the same videos play back smoothly on my junky 1.43GHz laptop with Intel X3100 video. I have encoded other videos in MPEG-4 AVC in lower resolutions with Nero Recode and those play back fine in Quicktime. Are there any tweaks to make h.264 playback better? I'm hoping the solution isn't to turn down the resolution back to somewhere around 720p because that's lame.