On 5/30/06, B. Bogart <ben@ekran.org> wrote:
Hi Chris,

Thanks for the answer. I guess I'm stuck with playing back about 16 movies
at once then... at least per machine.

I recall using an array of pix_multiimage objects, and I think it did not
reload the same images over and over again but somehow managed to access
the same pixes in memory rather than reallocating...

That's a very, very different object.  pix_film/movie use QT API calls which cannot be used in the same manner.

Indeed HDV and RAM formats are big, but I'm happy with my photo-jpeg QTs.
Also I'm working with a 1024x768 gemwin, so I've been dividing the
resolution by the number of clips.

Do you mean you are dividing 1024x768 into smaller clips and tiling across the screen?  A single 1024x768 is probably going to play better than 4 512x384 clips.  Also, use pix_movie if you don't need to do any pix_ processing on the video for better performance.

Also since we can now get 8GB of RAM in
these things I think its still faster that most arrays (with only 2-3
disks anyhow).

The limit per process in a 32bit OS is 4GB.

I guess [pix_multifilm] will remain a dream for now...

You could decompress the movie into a pix_buffer if you have enough RAM.  720x480 is just about 1GB per minute as I recall.

Thanks,
.b.

PS: did you pass on my profiler data to Apple so that (maybe) the next
version of QT will be useful for playing many clips simultaneously.

I could not reproduce the problem here so I didn't send it.