2 ms·

By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.

tialaramex 7y ago
It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
- anthk 7y ago
  Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more FPS on BeOS than under Windows.
- forwhomst 7y ago
  Not to disagree much but when Be was going around the country doing their "demo days" on the bebox nobody had a DVD player in their computer. DVD wasn't even on the market until after Be had ported BeOS to x86. People thought that playing the VHS-quality music videos that were included in Windows 95 was a hot demo (on a PC).

It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.

anthk 7y ago
Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
smallstepforman 7y ago
BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more FPS on BeOS than under Windows.
forwhomst 7y ago
Not to disagree much but when Be was going around the country doing their "demo days" on the bebox nobody had a DVD player in their computer. DVD wasn't even on the market until after Be had ported BeOS to x86. People thought that playing the VHS-quality music videos that were included in Windows 95 was a hot demo (on a PC).