🚀 go-pugleaf

I have not heard of any MPEG hardware for the mac.

R.e. the MPEG for Windows, I'm fairly sure that it's not what it seems:
this software almost certainly decompresses from disk into memory,
and then plays back from memory.  Current processors are not fast
enough to do JPEG in real time, and I don't think MPEG-1 is any
near possible either.

+ This means that this "mpeg" is limited by the total amount of memory.
Thus, the total length of the movie is limited (and some trade-off
of movie length vs resolution vs frame-rate).  It is thus
somewhat inferior to software-only quicktime, which is not
limited in length, only in size/rate.

The closest thing to real MPEG in any commerical products are the
JPEG-based Quicktime accelerators that are beginning to appear.  These
can do 640x480x24bit recording and playback at 30 frames/sec,
*at some level of quality* (possibly no better than vhs).  
SuperMac's digital film ($6000) and RasterOps MoviePak ($2000 
daughterboard) are the first two such products.

A recent MacWeek article said that one quicktime hardware accelerator
was used to produce a 1/2 hour show for public television in LA.
They claimed broadcast quality using an 8:1 compression ratio.
The show fit on 4G of disk.