From: ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: Re: Buying a multimedia system
Date: 7 Sep 92 18:31:46 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

In article <1992Sep6.145949.7467@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, mdicker@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mike Dickerson) writes:

>   * QT *can* double buffer from hard disk, and in fact, does this by
> default.  However, no one answered my question about whether it can do
> it in more than the small window the dealer showed.  I'm still looking
> for whether I can animate in full screen on a standard Mac-II (which
> is all that is within my price range).

This could depend very heavily on the sort of material you're trying to
play. If it's a computer-generated animation, with a relatively small area
of movement against a static background, then it may very well work. However,
if you're playing back realistic images (such as video previously captured
from a VCR or other source), then there's a lot more information in each
frame.

I'd say, don't get your hopes up. Another posting in this newsgroup mentions
performance improvements in a new, upcoming version of QuickTime. But with
QuickTime 1.0, I don't think you're going to get full-screen, full-frame-rate
output without significant hardware assistance.

>   * Several people told me the Macintosh dealer was wrong when he said
> there was more multimedia programs for the Macintosh.

I don't know about relative numbers, but I'd be a little surprised if any
other platform had a bigger variety of multimedia-*compatible* software than
the Mac. You can import QuickTime movies into both Microsoft Word 5.0 and
WordPerfect 2.1. You can create them with Mathematica 2.1. You can create
and import them with MacroMind Director 3.1 and Canvas 3.0.4. And then
there are the applications for editing digital video, like Adobe Premiere
and DiVA VideoShop. I even saw a demonstration of using Adobe PhotoShop to
edit frames directly in a QuickTime movie! (It had to be uncompressed, though.)
I think most of the 3D modelling and animation packages, even if they aren't
directly QuickTime-savvy yet, can export their output as PICS files, which
can be converted to QuickTime movies with several utilities.

On the Mac, multimedia isn't a separate application; it's just part of the
OS.

>   * Several people expressed doubts that the Mac System 7 can
> multitask that well.  They claimed that the reason the Mac dealer
> didn't do that demo (2 renders/download 9600/word processor) is
> because he couldn't.  But I find this a little hard to believe because
> everything I've ever heard says that Mac System 7 is a multitasking OS.

There's multitasking, and there's multitasking. Preemptive systems like the
Amiga do a better job of sharing out the CPU between multiple CPU-intensive
activities. On the Mac, you have to rely on applications voluntarily giving
up the CPU often enough to avoid starving other applications of processing time.

But the Mac has a lot of nice interprocess communication facilities, to
let you get information between applications easily. The most basic example
is simple cut-and-paste; under System 7 you also have publish-and-subscribe
("hot links") and AppleEvents.

> * Someone else emailed me that even though devices such as DCTV exist
> for the Amiga, you can't run programs on them.  Is this true?  He said
> that for the Macintosh, you can run a program designed for, say, 8 bit
> color, on a 24 bit color card, and all the software will know what to
> do and work right.  He said that almost no programs can be run on the
> Amiga graphics cards, which sounds strange, because what good would
> they be then?  Is this true?  Can I, say, take my word processor or
> whatever and run it on DCTV or other such display devices?  (Ie, any
> old program)?

I, too, would like to know for sure. The Mac was built with a hardware-
independent graphics model from the ground up, whereas the Amiga seems
highly reliant on the peculiarities of a particular set of graphics chips.
*Can* you indeed plug a 24-bit display into an Amiga, and immediately run
all your existing applications on it in 24-bit mode, like you can on the Mac?

> * Somebody mentioned that "MPEG" will become very important soon to
> multimedia.  I know there is MPEG for the Mac, but dunno about the
> Amiga - is there MPEG available there, or will there be?

MPEG for the Mac--that's news to me! An important part of QuickTime is its
image-compression services. The standard set of compressors provided includes
JPEG (which is meant for single frames, as opposed to MPEG which includes
a pretty sophisticated scheme for optimizing out similarities between
frames as well). It's an open architecture, and you can plug in alternative
compression algorithms, or alternative implementations of existing algorithms
(e g a hardware card that does JPEG). But I haven't heard that anyone has
actually come out with an MPEG implementation yet.

>   * Can Quicktime movies be played on a standard 68030 color Macintosh
> in full screen mode at 24 fps??  I guess everything kinda hinges on
> this.  If I have to stick to 2 inch windows that makes nice demos, but
> doesn't do me much good :-).   If it does, I'll probably end up with a
> Mac just because of the above concerns.  If not, then I'll hafta go
> with the Amiga just to get full screen animations.  Info on this?

I'd like to know what sort of images you saw on the DCTV. Were they
computer-generated animations, or captured digital video?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-7-856-2889
Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-7-838-4066
University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+12:00
To someone with a hammer and a screwdriver, every problem looks
like a nail with threads.