Movie Loader - From Memory

Hi,

is that possible to load .mov files directly to the memory before playback starts from the hard drive?

When i played 4-5 mov (10-30mb) files from my fw400 hdd the fps amount goes down.

smokris's picture
Me Too.

It's not really due to slowness in reading from the harddrive, it's due to a limitation in QuickTime that requires movies to be loaded using the primary application thread --- and QuickTime takes an unusually long amount of time to load a movie... So, when using QuickTime movies you're guaranteed to see a massive framerate drop.

Basically I think there are two options for improvement:

  1. Use something other than QuickTime to play movies, and write a new Movie Loader-like patch. We've had some success using Xvid... We used this exclusively back when we were doing VJing in Linux... but we haven't yet gotten the assembly optimizations working on Mac OS X, so decoding is really slow. Maybe Theora is another option (haven't tried this yet)?

  2. Make a separate helper application that decodes and shares the decoded frames to a Movie Loader-like patch. This solution would be Really Ugly, and it wouldn't really solve the problem either (it would stop QC from blocking while loading movies, but there would still be an unreasonable amount of lag before receiving the first frame).

franz's picture
+1

me too loading all the movies from a Ramdisk (like EsperanceDV) does help, but still, there is some lag. A proper Movie Loader patch would be a great improvement, esp. with non-QT cutsom made codec. The guys from MXwendler are actually developping their own codec for a full perf. replay. I'm eager to see something like this for QC. ... someday ... or maybe a complete QuickTime rewrite...

.lov.'s picture
good idea

creating a ramdisk is a good idea actually. I hope in 10.6 QuicktimeX and Quartz Composer will plays pjpeg movs better.