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DVD decoding in software? A DVD FAQ suggests a 400Mhz PIII if you don't use any hardware acceleration.
Adamation's personalStudio at least _alleges_ a 600 Mhz machine as a minimum for real-time video effects previews, etc.
Last year, someone at The Perl Journal wrote about capturing video and comparing individual frames; IIRC, using a specific optimized module, he captured video without dropping frames with a dual 500 Mhz machine... The Perl Journal site is down (pending transfer of ownership, probably) and I don't have that issue handy.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are killer apps - I mean, I don't know where to look for info on MPEG4/Divx :), but, well, what kind of application are you thinking about?

The work I am doing with the Linux Quality Database is inspired in large part by a desire to bring this kind of quality to Open Source and Free Software systems. I use Linux on a daily basis in my own work now but honestly my experience of it wears me down and I fell so... refreshed whenever I restart into the BeOS.

But it is clear to me that Be, Inc.'s troubles are due to lack of wisdom and commitment among its management despite the best efforts of its engineers. From the start, Be made very little effort to market to the public, even though anyone who ever tried the BeOS immediately liked it and usually wanted to run it on their machine.

After a while it became clear that Be had problems keeping its commitments to its developers. I lost out on a lot of evenings and weekends spent developing a product that didn't sell well when I could have developed another product for the Mac OS - I was well into one for the Mac but gave it up for the BeOS. The investors who funded BeatWare and Adamation lost millions of dollars on their BeOS development efforts; the companies were only saved when they ported their products to the Mac OS and Windows.

Read about my observations about the difficulties that a number of companies have had surviving in the turbulent world of High-Tech, including my advice as to why business partnerships with Be are best avoided:

• The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

• Freeing the Developer from OS Vendor Shackles

• Some of Us Work for a Living

Be dug their own grave. If someone comes to their rescue with new funding, I'd like to suggest that the package include a new top-level management team with a mandate to shake things up. Firing the sales-prevention team would help.

I'll be sad if the BeOS dies and I hope they do open source it. It is likely that it uses licensed technology so that they could not legally open source the whole thing; let us hope they take the route netscape did and remove the proprietary parts and allow the open sourcing of the rest, rather than allowing it to die.

Mike

After years of silver-tongued promises of support from Be for such things as marketing support for developers, Be never effectively marketed it's own BeOS desktop operating system and then announced that it was ceasing development of it, except to the extent necessary to support it's development of the BeIA internet appliance platform.

This means, for example, that the current rev of the BeOS won't install on my PC because I use an Ultra160 SCSI controller - Be doesn't see these as necessary for support of it's development platform.

And you can forget about marketing support for those of use who listened to Be's promises and actually shipped commercial products for the BeOS.

While I may have lost a lot of time and effort coding spellcheckers that could have been better spent elsewhere, Be developers BeatWare and Adamation lost millions, and are only able to survive because they ported to Windows or Mac.

My essential point is that Be is not to be trusted by Sony when times get difficult for it. There was a time when folks like me, Adamation and Beatware were all Be had. If Be can screw us, why can't they screw Sony?

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

If you're looking for good tools, you might check out personalStudio, a video editing program for BeOS. It's ridiculously cheap - you can get a bundle with the software, BeOS Pro edition, AND a 1394 video capture card (which has drivers for BeOS of course) & cable for like $129 US. I think you can even run BeOS on that laptop, though laptops aren't officially supported....

Sponge

Even simple mp3 players like SoundPlay are capable, in Be, of playing multiple tracks simultaneously, even at different speeds. If you are in to making music on computers you really should give Be a look. The free version of R5 should be available on the 28th.

-=RR=-

That would put it in direct competition with Paint Shop Pro 6.

GIMP needs to be faster with large images (not that PSP is fast with them), and, most importantly, allow for effect/transformation layers etc.

What would be useful is something like Adamation's ImageElements where you have diagramatically represented effects applied to layer objects.