Sun

Same like the one I posted in the SGI forum, except it's about Suns as well. I think a Sun would be a more practical machine overall, with working USB Mass Storage for one and perhaps more filesystem support, but I haven't given up hope on acquiring an SGI yet.

So as usual - how fast of an UltraSPARC do I need to get average sized H.264 rips going? I don't really expect 720p out of a Sun Blade 150 (at least a 150 should be able to do normal H.264 videos, right?), but if a dual processor Blade 1000 can do that, that'd be really nice.
Average sized being 704x396, 640x480, 848x480, or 1024x576 (not really average but I have a few videos like that). Video player being MPlayer, unless Solaris comes with a better one (or if VLC has caught up with MPlayer). Are there any special cautions I should take with Sun graphics options? Will the aforementioned players use both CPUs?

And as a side question - what in the world are Fibre Channel A something Loop hard drives? The Blade 1000 and 2000 use these, apparently, and I've never heard of such an interface before. It seems SCSI is higher level than FC.

EDIT: nvm, I don't wanna search for FC disks.

You're referring to FC-AL, Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop. It's an interface more commonly used in SANs.

You can go to sunsolve.sun.com and get part numbers for Fibre Channel hard disks from the Sun System Handbook for your Sun Blade workstations.

I'd say that probably a Blade 1000/2000 could play H.264 720p video, but I haven't tested it.

BTW, FC disks aren't horribly expensive, about the same prices as SCSI overall, especially on eBay. They're a little harder to find, though. Also, it's possible to boot a Blade 1000/2000 (practically the same machine) from external SCSI. Most of them on the second-hand market have at least one FC disk in them already - you could boot from that and use a SCSI or Firewire one for storage.

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I'm curious to find out more information related to ritchan's original question:

ritchan wrote: how fast of an UltraSPARC do I need to get average sized H.264 rips going?

I'm thinking about getting a Sun Blade 2500 to tinker with and get into the Sun/SPARC/Solaris world. I see some single 1.6 GHz US IIIi with XVR-600 + 4 GB RAM configs on ebay that are within my price range. I mainly edit photos, work with office documents, listen to music, and browse the web. All seem to be capable with Solaris so I'm thinking of using a SB 2500 as a daily driver.

But for some fun and diversion, I would also like to watch videos. How does the SPARC build of OpenCSW mplayer perform? Would the config I mentioned above be able to play 1280x720 HD? How about regular 640 or 720 width videos?

And how about web browsing? Are the latest SPARC builds of Firefox and flash player usable on the SB 2500?

I've been running Solaris 10 u8 in a VM on my Macbook to learn and get used to it. So far so good. But granted, I'm testing on a modern Intel Mac. Would appreciate hearing any real world "modern computing" experiences with an actual SPARC machine. Thanks!

toasty wrote: Sorry to bump an old thread, but I'm curious to find out more information related to ritchan's original question:

ritchan wrote: how fast of an UltraSPARC do I need to get average sized H.264 rips going?

I'm thinking about getting a Sun Blade 2500 to tinker with and get into the Sun/SPARC/Solaris world. I see some single 1.6 GHz US IIIi with XVR-600 + 4 GB RAM configs on ebay that are within my price range. I mainly edit photos, work with office documents, listen to music, and browse the web. All seem to be capable with Solaris so I'm thinking of using a SB 2500 as a daily driver.

But for some fun and diversion, I would also like to watch videos. How does the SPARC build of OpenCSW mplayer perform? Would the config I mentioned above be able to play 1280x720 HD? How about regular 640 or 720 width videos?

And how about web browsing? Are the latest SPARC builds of Firefox and flash player usable on the SB 2500?

I've been running Solaris 10 u8 in a VM on my Macbook to learn and get used to it. So far so good. But granted, I'm testing on a modern Intel Mac. Would appreciate hearing any real world "modern computing" experiences with an actual SPARC machine. Thanks!

So, as someone who really likes Sun boxes, let me help you the best I can.

The IIIi is probably comparable in preference to a Pentium IV, and is about as old. I have a SunBlade 1500 here (and Netra T1, and a SunFire V245 at work), with 2GB of RAM and a 1GHz proc.

Software - It looks like Firefox 31 (ESR, mind you) is the most recent build of FF and Thunderbird for SPARC. Which really isn't that old of a build anyway. Now Flash, I think Flash Player 10 was the last version for SPARC? But yes, they should all run on there (I'll boot my SunBlade for you).

Okay, so the "can it run?" See if the attached answers your question. Quick testing shows mine can play youtube at 360 and 480 (frames are dropping for me at 480p) using flash player, and HTML5 player seems to not work. The video power also reflects on the GPU, which mine's not designed for this kind of usage. I do not have any video players installed to test out local video formats for you.

armanox wrote: Okay, so the "can it run?" See if the attached answers your question. Quick testing shows mine can play youtube at 360 and 480 (frames are dropping for me at 480p) using flash player, and HTML5 player seems to not work. The video power also reflects on the GPU, which mine's not designed for this kind of usage. I do not have any video players installed to test out local video formats for you.

Definitely helps with giving me an idea what web browsing would be like. And I can live with 360p youtube videos. Thanks for taking the time to test!

Oracle claims to be making some new lower price Sparc processors (which I bet wil still be in the 4-8+ cores range since thier high end stuff is 32cores now)

So... that would be some new stuff that might be able to handle 4k resolution videos in the not so distant future.

toasty wrote: Software - It looks like Firefox 31 (ESR, mind you) is the most recent build of FF and Thunderbird for SPARC.

Wow! Things have degenerated a lot for SPARC desktops. Not even the latest ESR? How long will Firefox 31 ESR be supported with security fixes? And the fact most malware is x86/win32 isn't much comfort, there are XSSes and cookie theft vulns.

Now Flash, I think Flash Player 10 was the last version for SPARC?

Does it matter? Any computer not running Windows should not have Flash anymore. And on Windows it's just because YouTube with flash consumes less CPU than the HTML5 video player.

kurkosdr wrote:

toasty wrote: Software - It looks like Firefox 31 (ESR, mind you) is the most recent build of FF and Thunderbird for SPARC.

Wow! Things have degenerated a lot for SPARC desktops. Not even the latest ESR? How long will Firefox 31 ESR be supported with security fixes? And the fact most malware is x86/win32 isn't much comfort, there are XSSes and cookie theft vulns.

Now Flash, I think Flash Player 10 was the last version for SPARC?

Does it matter? Any computer not running Windows should not have Flash anymore. And on Windows it's just because YouTube with flash consumes less CPU than the HTML5 video player.

I find it kind of sad, but there again how few people are using a Sparc system for a desktop? I know I did in college, but, just not something I see. I also don't think Solaris has the same kind of close knit community that IRIX has, nekochan seems to be pretty unique (though I would love to see a Sun, AIX, or HPUX equivalent to it. I'd go buy a Power server or an HP Integrity (and HPUX is reasonably priced too, unlike IRIX) and do some porting work and enjoy being on real UNIX instead of Linux (never quite got into the BSD world too much) and having non-Intel architecture to use.

On Flash - thankfully it's becoming less common across the board. The real issue is there is no hardware acceleration for the video codecs more so the what flash/HTML5 provides. Other then streaming media and some old flash-based web widgets I use to create/test for a previous job (and most of them I had done in JS anyway) I don't see the need for flash to be running (hence why I use Flashblock in Firefox). Final note - Flash on OS X (on Intel) is fully up to date too, so add that along side your windows comment

The point of my post was not (only) to lament the state of SPARC desktops when it comes to software support, but that "using it as a daily driver" is NOT a good idea if you don't have access to browser security fixes.

kurkosdr wrote: ... that "using it as a daily driver" is NOT a good idea if you don't have access to browser security fixes.

Why ? If you're not stupid enough to do online banking or keep photos of your mom screwing a German Shepherd on a computer connected to the Internet, what the heck do you have to lose ? If you take normal precautions, I can't see where a Solaris-user has anything to fear from an old browser.

H.264 contains some algorithms that are much more efficient in hardware than in software (specifically bit packing). Without hardware support it is probably a lost cause.

I have a Sun Ultra 20 with a dual core Opteron that has trouble with HTML5 video. Flash fairs a bit better. I'd expect a single IIIi to not fair super well with HTML5.

With UltraSPARC II(i) it's possible to decode up to two MPEG-2 streams simultaneously (at video resolution ?, software ?).
Comparing this with the requirements for H.264 alias MPEG-4/AVC you need a way more powerfull CPU, beginning with UltraSPARC III(i).
But each x86_64 (x64) CPU is the better option for this enterprise, I think.
If it has to be SPARC, choose maybe a more powerfull system like V480/V490, V880/V890 or better with many CPU's. - Not the ideal "play-near-screen" systems unless you have big sound boxes.