DVD Player

I ranted about Panther's DVD player quite a bit in a previous article on the mini, and just as I expected, the issues I raised in that article have not been addressed by Tiger.  Tiger's de-interlacer and scaler are absolutely horrible and unacceptable by today's standards.  While I didn't conduct the same level of tests that I did for my review of the DVD player with the mini, all tests that I did run exhibited the same combing artifacts and poor scaler quality as I had seen in Panther.  Given the fact that apparently many Mac users had complained about Panther's DVD player in the past, I'm quite surprised that it wasn't fixed in Tiger.

CPU utilization doesn't appear to be fixed either; DVD playback on the Mac mini continues to eat up a minimum of 40% of the machine's CPU time. Although, I haven't seen it peak at 65% since the upgrade to Tiger. 

iChat AV 3 & Quicktime 7

Both of these applications do receive extensive updates, but honestly, I've not used either enough to even begin to feel comfortable with posting my opinions of them.  The support for the H.264 codec is extremely important and I'm hoping that it will live up to its hype in future usage models. 

iChat finally supports the display of multiple groups at the same time, instead of having to switch between groups to make them visible, which makes it a much more reasonable IM client. 

I will do my best, if the desire is still there, to comment on these applications more in a future Mac article.

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