I had to make sure, so I bought the $20 Quicktime MPEG2 Plugin

I know that mpeg2 was quoted as not being a 1.0 feature and I know it says in the manual that MPEG1 and MPEG2 are not supported, but for some reason, I had to just see it for myself since I have a ton of videos in MPEG2 format (audio/video). If somehow it worked, I wanted to know if the CPU would run lower. I'm running MP4s now and depending on the bitrate and size, my CPU is hitting between 40-75 in the task manager. I know that when I run mpeg2 in VDJ, my CPU runs much lower than running mp4, so I wanted to see if Serato would handle the file different. Well, of course it didn't work, haha. Even though the same mpeg2 files work fine in quicktime, the video plugin isn't ready for it yet.
Hopefully they can get mpeg2 running in 1.1 or a future update. My mpeg2 files work in VDJ and DVDJs, so I would think that Serato would be able to play these too.

I get my videos in MPEG-2 format from www.JonesTM.com and I don't want to spend extra time converting them to mpeg-4.

Compatibility with MPEG-2 would be nice.

mpeg-2 is a waste.

twizzle i told you it wouldnt work but you had to see for yourself :-)

Well the files play fine (both audio & video) in quicktime.

Id hope so, that is what u paid for ;-)

What a-swift was referring to before in another post was that the mpeg2 plugin wouldn't play vob/mpeg2 rips that have ac3 or pcm audio. That is true, but my mpeg2 videos have mpeg2 audio.

where did you get mpeg2 video files with mp2 audio. defintely not from dvd. i guess you must have made them.

i made them in sony vegas. 384k mpeg2 audio worked well in vdj. when i play comparable h.264 files in vdj, my cpu runs much higher. i figured that if they can get mpeg2 running, maybe the users that don't meet the minimum specs might have better luck running those files.

Those users should be able to run mpeg4 the bitrate will be higher than it would be for h.264 but still lower than for mpeg2 and you should get a similar reduction in CPU usage.

h.264 with a hardware decorder card would be THE SHIT. tiny file sizes, zero cpu util for decode. unfortunately the only affordable hardware decoder i know of is for the mac and i have no clue whether or not it would work with vsl.

Were would the hardware decoder go? In the express card slot? or is it just a piece of software?

I think the one a-swift is talking about is USB, but it could also be express card, pcmcia or firewire.
However I think most modern GPUs can be used to decode H.264, certainly ATI cards have onboard acceleration for h.264 and I would imagine nvidia do something similar.

the H.264 could theoretically sit anywhere in the device chain that has a high enough bandwidth and a progmatically accessible interface. so in theory you could have an H.264 accelerator that sat in the video card, in the video card, on the motherboard attached to a PCI bus, in a PCI, AGI, PCI-X or PCI-Express slot, Firewire or even USB.

The cards I've seen are either pro broadcast devices costing thousands of dollars, which connect via a card in the system or the low end mac one i've seen was USB.

Will the Low End Mac one help with my choppy/hiccupy video? or is that I just need more Virtual Memory??

virtual memory is not going to help anything. some real memory might though.

I have 2gb, the only difference was that I had very little space left on my Internal Drive and when I checked my activity Monitor, my computer was maxing out my Wired Ram and Virtual Ram...I just thought cleaning up the drive might make a difference....Up to 13GB free and about to plug in my mixer and see if there is a difference...If it is still giving me trouble, what do u suggest?