aurora72,
Quote:

I have a mini with 32MB VRam and a PB with 128MB. Guess what the the mini outperform the PB.

My mini clocked at 1,58GHz and my PB runs at 1,67GHz. So what?

I think on all the G4 system the playback of movies (1080, 720p and even lower) is heavily affected by ram bandwith, ram latency, and FSB. Because all the g4 apple family FSB is stuck at 167MHz (or worse), even if you have DDR2 memory modules inside. Everybody talks about the needed processor power, but the truth is that in these system the real bottlenec is the low FSB.

My mini is overclocked at 1,58GHz, but it outperforms the 1.8GHz 2.0 GHZ minis/powermacs in memory speed. (dont't know how yet, maybe this OC setting has a lot better latency than for higher settings) For example my Minis has 503/1044 r/w MB/sec ramspeed, while my PB is 334/680.

On the movies side: the same 720p mkv (matrix, 6300Kbits/s video 640kbits audio, 1280*544) with the same mplayer setting:
On PB: avarage cpu load 82-85%
Mini: avarage cpu load 75-79%

Anyway most of the 720p movies is playable on my mini, half of them has the audio is not in syncron after a half our, and the rest is after a few minute. On my pb the things worse. Of course this is for above 5000 Kbits/s. under that everything is flies.

How can the to smoother the playback:

-Try to playback from ram. (or ssd) I suspect that playing from an ide hdd is 1-3% slower than from ram.
-try different filesystem. Don't know how it effects, but SFS has its limitations.
-ask Morphos developer to enhance the ATI drivers