On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Roman Haefeli <reduzierer@yahoo.de> wrote:

i see. thanks for the explanation. one reason, why i was thinking, that
gem doesn't use hw acceleration was that the cpu power used is quite
similar to the ones, when the same file is played by mplayer or vlc. but
according to what you say, it would probably be still impossible to play
1080p with [pix_film] without hw accel.

I made many GEM based art works that played 4 1080 clips and recorded a live stream to disk all in real time. I think the problem you are having is the H.264 codec, which is intended for ultra-low data bandwidth applications. Switching to Apple Intermediate or one of the professional codecs (DVCPRO_HD or ProRes) will improve performance far more than trying to offload the 100:1 compressed H.264 to the GPU.