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I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D
by bitL 7y ago
I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D
- pjmlp 7y agoBluebottle OS (written in Active Oberon, a GC enabled systems programming language) was also capable of it. http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?action=download&upname=AosScreenshot3.jpg http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...
- anthk 7y agoLinux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.
- Octoth0rpe 7y ago> without crashing like Windows That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.
- anthk 7y agoNvidia TNT2/Geforce2 MX later. EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 7y agoIn 2001 I could still hang X Windows as much as I liked. And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.
- aeyes 7y agoI think most hangs on Linux today are caused by low memory pressure, see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620545 No swap, some swap, huge swap, swappiness=0, zram - nothing helped me.
- com2kid 7y agoWindows 2000 was rock solid stable with uptime measured in "how long do I keep running before I get bored if bragging about my uptime?" No comment in regards to the 9x line. ;)
- danieldk 7y agoHigh definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video acceleration. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#Application_support https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
- slim 7y agoI found Wayland more capable than xwindows in this regard
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ac29 7y agoPretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power). The only exceptions I can think of are early generation Atom processors, which were terribly slow.
- danieldk 7y agoPretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power). The point is that modern GPUs have hardware decoding for common codecs, and will use far less power than CPU decoding. But the major browsers on Linux (Firefox and Chrome) disable hardware decoding on Linux, because $PROBLEMS. So, you end up with battery draining CPU-based 1080p decoding. And even more battery draining or choppy 4k decoding.
- acdha 7y agoLinux could do that only if your system was lightly loaded. Once you started to have I/O contention, none of the available kernel schedulers could reliably avoid stuttering.
- blihp 7y agoDon't forget about xanim
- fouc 7y agoI had this experience too, my video card was so shitty that I wasn't able to watch 700mb divx videos in windows, I had to boot into linux and use mplayer.
- AtlasBarfed 7y agoOk, so this is the big BeOS thing I've heard. What technically enabled this on such limited hardware? Was there lack of security/containerization/sandboxing that made os call much faster and context switches better?
- amatecha 7y agoReal pre-emptive multitasking? I seem to recall that was one of the huge differentiating factors of it against Mac / Windows.
- wokkel 7y agoAmiga did this in 1985. It's just that for compatibility reasons Apple couldn't do this. Even funnier: the fastest hardware to run old MacOS (68k version) on: an Amiga computer.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoA non-Apple computer? Was "Hackintosh" (presumably under a different name) a thing back then?
- reaperducer 7y agoYou didn't need to build a Hackintosh. You could buy legal, officially-licensed Mac clones back then.
- amatecha 7y agoAh yeah I still have my PowerComputing PowerTower Pro! At the time it was a current model, its 512mb of RAM was insane and my friends & classmates were jealous! hahah :)
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoI sometimes used my Atari ST with an emulator called Aladin. "Cracked" to work without Mac ROMs. But wasn't really useful to me because of lack of applications (at the time). IIRC there were solutions like this for the Amiga too.
- cbm-vic-20 7y agoBeOS would also let you do that while playing them backwards; useless, but a nice demo of the multimedia capabilities of the OS.
- remcob 7y agoThis would be challenging with modern codecs using delta frames. The only way I can see it work is precomputing all frames from the preceeding keyframe. Doable, but decent effort for a fairly obscure feature. But did video formats back then use delta frames?
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoI never saw BeOS do that with video, but I heard it do it with MP3 files. SoundPlay was a kind of crazy bananas MP3 player -- it could basically act as a mixer, letting you not only "queue up" multiple files but play each of them simultaneously at different volume levels and even different speeds. I've still never seen anything like it outside of DJ software.
- machinecoffee 7y agoThe thing also booted up faster than you could blink. Of course that might have changed if they added more system services, but from POST screen to a usable desktop was easily under 15 seconds.