tep wrote:
Thanks for your answers. Matteo : i'm afraid it's the playback which is unsatisfying by itself ..... i' ll have to "upgrade" to better computers. Thanks also for pointing out this synchro matter, which will be necessary anyway because the videos can last as long as 15 mn.. It should be fine, hopefully, by sending a "master clock" ascending value through udp. Otherwise, if it's like hiccup, i'll keep your idea of comparing incoming values to skip / pause the needed frames.
Marco : which type of macs did you use ? Mine are fairly tired : it's both ibooks, with a 933Mhz processor.
I first tried to launch my videos using VLC with the system object, which was much lighter for the computers. But the sync is not reliable at all, and the windows blink when opening : not clean enough for my installations ...
I was thinking of trying VLC but never did, since the GEM way was much more flexible and I could create a nice interface in Pd.
I've used some very low end machines (both old macs running OSX and debian on old PCs) as slaves quite successfully. Your ibooks will probably handle DV playback adequately, especially if they are the slaves and are not doing anything else. Quicktime has handled DV very well since much effort was put in to get Final Cut Pro working smoothly on the early G4s. Try using the raw DV format rather than the .mov format, or try without audio.
Simon