First off: Thanks to all who have filled me in on the existence of the 68070. I assumed rashly that the particular number would be reserved for further enhancements to the Motorola line, rather than meted out to another company. Ah, well, I guess that's what I get when I assume the computer industry will operate in a logical manner! ;-)  In article <1993Apr16.212441.34125@rchland.ibm.com> Ricardo Hernandez Muchado, ricardo@rchland.vnet.ibm.com writes: >   Sean, I don't want to get into a 'mini-war' by what I am going to say, >but I have to be a little bit skeptic about the performance you are >claiming on the Centris, you'll see why (please, no-flames, I reserve >those for c.s.m.a :-) ) > >   I was in Chicago in the last consumer electronics show, and Apple had a >booth there.  I walked by, and they were showing real-time video capture >using a (Radious or SuperMac?) card to digitize and make right on the spot >quicktime movies.  I think the quicktime they were using was the old one >(1.5).  Version 1.5 of Quicktime is, as has been stated, the current version of the software. The older version is 1.0, and 1.6 is on the horizon in the not too distant future.  >   They digitized a guy talking there in 160x2xx something.  It played back quite >nicely and in real time.  The guy then expanded the window (resized) to 25x by >3xx (320 in y I think) and the frame rate decreased enough to notice that it >wasn't 30fps (or about 30fps) anymore.  It dropped to like 15 fps.  Then he >increased it just a bit more, and it dropped to 10<->12 fps.   Quicktime does a much better job of playing back movies at size than it does playing back resized movies. Apparently the process of expanding each frame's image and dithering the resultant bitmap to the appropriate bit depth is pretty processor-intensive. There are optimizers that work pretty well for showing movies at double size, but if you drop to 1.9x size or increase to 2.1x size, performance suffers dramatically.  >   Then I asked him what Mac he was using... He was using a Quadra (don't know >what model, 900?) to do it, and he was telling the guys there that the Quicktime >could play back at the same speed even on an LCII.  He lied. :-) Quicktime is very CPU dependent. He was probably confused by the fact that QT is locked to an internal timecode, and will play in the same amount of time on any machine. However, an LC will drop frames in order to keep the sound and video synced up.  The Centris and Quadras have similar CPUs and will thus boast similar performance, though the Quadras will be a bit faster due to marginally faster clock speeds and somewhat different architecture.  >   Well, I spoiled his claim so to say, since a 68040 Quadra Mac was having >a little bit of trouble.  And this wasn't even from the hardisk!  This was >from memory! > >   Could it be that you saw either a newer version of quicktime, or some >hardware assisted Centris, or another software product running the  >animation (like supposedly MacroMind's Accelerator?)?  I expect that the version of the Quicktime software you saw was 1.0 -- I was using was 1.5. One of the new codecs in v1.5 allows video at nearly twice the size and the same frame rate as what version 1.0 could handle. The Centris 650 I saw was a plain-vanilla, with the exception of the nice speakers that were playing the sound, and the software was Movie Player, the QT player Apple includes with the software.  >   Don't misunderstand me, I just want to clarify this.