Hi Peggy,
It seems floats aren't
accepted.
floats are working fine on my installation of GEM (0.90.1) with pd 0.37 / 0.38.4 on win2k. I agree that the default height values are pretty high, I found values ranging from .01 to 0.3 useful.
Sometimes the texturing with a video doesn't
work, and pd crashs.
It seems to depend on the codec I use, for example
cinepak doesn't work,
as johannes already stated, gem's codec support under windows is a bit oldschool. gem does not use the direct show api, which is pretty much the standard nowadays. so if you have a specific direct show codec installed that is working with other applications, you cannot take it for granted that this codec will also work with gem. codecs that are definitely working are indeo (version 3.2, all others don't!) and huffyuv lossless. The former produces bad-looking clips and does start to stutter if you're using frame rates higher than 25 fps. huffyuv is okay quality-wise, also seeking works fine, but playing more than 3 clips simultanously pretty much maxes out even recent cpus. mpeg4 (xvid, divx) is a no-go, since seeking in these files produces funny-looking artifacts if you don't hit a key frame. avisynth is worth a look, but then again, it is not possible to produce an avs script from within pd (unless you are using an external scripting language like python) - so you have to create them manually. they should look something like
[myscript.avs) directshowsource("\path\andnameofyourclip.avi") converttorgb32
gem handles those faked avis quite fine, although seeking does take a long time.
having said all this, you should also note that newWave tends to screw up textures quite badly - see http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2005-04/027464.html
hope this helps (and doesn't discourage you from using gem - it's till great!), thoralf.
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