hi tim,
sorry can't help you with the memory leak... but
i'm looking too for the best video codec for linux/gem. since libdv is really slow on linux (expensive on the cpu), i have to encode my footage, but i want to keep a good resolution (640x480). so, i did some test with lots of formats and codecs. the best codec for quality and not too expensive on cpu is avi :: rawvideo (yuv i think). but the colors of the video in gem are bad (rainbow)...
so, i tried mpeg2. it's loading fine, but there's a problem: gem can't loop it, i have to reload the video. maybe it's the way i encoded it (using ffmpeg). some people say that motionjpeg with quicktime is the best, but not for a 640x480 video...
still doing some research, i'll let you know and let me know! pat