Four gigabytes, four OSes, one Mac

Upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4Gb yesterday, and was eager to play around and see how much it would help. What better way than to fire up all my virtual machines at once and see how it performed? Here’s the video… sorry it’s a nasty .mov file, but in my defence, it really is encoded as a Theora movie (a plugin for which you may need to install from here, if you’re viewing on OSX or Windows).

I haven’t tried to see if I can trick it into playing in Totem et al. yet on Solaris / Linux– let me know if you have any joy. For the record, the OSes are OS X 10.4.11, Solaris Nevada b77, Ubuntu Gutsy, and Win XP, all running in VMware Fusion 1.1.

11 thoughts on “Four gigabytes, four OSes, one Mac”

  1. The playback of this movie requires a video/x-gst-fourcc-XiTh decoder plugin which is not installed.

    Ubuntu/Gutsy.

  2. @ Benoรฎt: ah well, did the best I could with the tools I had to hand… was just a bit of a silly whim anyway ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. I’m wondering why haven’t you used the ‘Ogg’ file format for that Theora file? XiphQT comes with the Theora encoder and the Ogg muxer/exporter. If you used QuickTime Player to export the file there should be the ‘Movie to Ogg’ option in the export dialog, or something similar…

    Anyway, yay! for using Theora, and for a cool movie, too! ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. @Arek: D’oh, I never thought of that– I captured the movie using SnapzPro, which while it obviously found the Theora codec, still wrapped it up in a .mov file. I’ll try the Quicktime export now to see if it works…

    EDIT: Of course it worked ๐Ÿ™‚ Redux post updated…

  5. Just for clarity, did you capture a Theora movie with Snapz Pro X + XiphQT and then change the container with Quicktime Pro without re-encoding the video?

  6. Dave: I captured the Theora .mov file with Snapz Pro X + XiphQT, opened it QT player, and used the Export function to create the .ogg file.

    Although I didn’t alter any of the encoding parameters for the Export, I suspect this did actually re-encode the movie, judging by the length of time it took and a slight degradation of quality compared to the original .mov file.

  7. You mighgt want to actually link to the Ogg version, rather than making people play guess-the-URL. ๐Ÿ˜‰

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