QuickTime Performance
One thing Linux has been lacking is the ability to watch video encoded for QuickTime. Unlike the usability of office applications, performance will make the difference between what is viewable (or usable) and what is not, as lag will translate directly into dropped frames during playback. Fortunately, QuickTime has a "show movie info" option that reports the frame rates in real-time. I chose to use
The Lord of the Rings Trailer #2 for this test.
The frame rate was recorded every 10 seconds to get an average score for each resolution of the trailer. Here are the resolutions tested:
| Trailer size | Resolution | Max frames per second |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 240 x 128 | 8 |
| Medium | 320 x 172 | 12 |
| Large | 480 x 260 | 24 |
| Full Screen | 640 x 480 | n/a |
The "max frames per second" is what you should get if no frames are dropped during playback.
The frame rate for the "full screen" size needs further comment. When running QuickTime for this size, the info box reported a max frame rate of 0.33 which is obviously incorrect (and I can tell it was quite it bit higher just by watching it). Also, for this size, the frame rate reported during playback was always zero. This would happen in both Win4Lin and a normal installation of Windows 98SE, so it is either a problem with QuickTime or else the ability to measure frame rates was disabled for some reason.
The results for Win4Lin were obtained in full screen mode (which is particularly useful for giving PowerPoint presentations). You can launch Win4Lin in full screen mode by using the "fwin" command. Win4Lin spawns a second X-server before starting Windows, and you can switch back to Linux by typing ctrl + alt + F7. Using ctrl + alt + F8 will take you back again. Here are the results:
