Hi Nuno
I guess I shouldn't promote an alternative to GEM here but did you try EyesWeb? (www.eyesweb.org). Its a free windows software mainly for analysing video input but also have some transformation stuff. There is a probably a simple patch showing you a mixing of two streams. I am myself using eyesweb for basic video analysis connected to pd for more processing and sound generation stuff.
Anyway, mixing 4 different files seems to be an quite simple task not requring too much video card facilities. My experience is that the decoding takes much more cpu time than anything else. I would recommend you to try AVI format with the old (but fast decoding) compression cinepak. Cinepak is included in the xp distribution and can also be viewed in quicktime on a mac as far as I know.
/Anders

Nuno Godinho wrote: 
Hi,

This is a P4 at 3.2GHz with 1Gb of RAM and an ATI 9600 video card. Not the
best in the world but I would say its acceptable for my intents.

Hum...  so, from what you say... what I want to do is indeed performance
intensive. But how can this be if in Adobe Premiere I can run much more
videos simultaneously and still apply some filters on the fly?

How do you intend to improve things?
What alternativs do I have?
Does it run smoothly in Mac? Is this a PC-only issue?

I thought the idea of turning off the invisible videos was quite reasonable.
But somehow pd takes over 1 second to react and turn one video on or off.

I could use a slightly slower framerate... But this would only be a
temporary solution.

Thanks,
Nuno


  
-----Original Message-----
From: cgclepper@gmail.com [mailto:cgclepper@gmail.com] On 
Behalf Of chris clepper
Sent: segunda-feira, 12 de Dezembro de 2005 16:34
To: Nuno Godinho
Cc: PD list
Subject: Re: [PD] Fading between 4 videos - performance issues

What kind of hardware are you using?  I have a 3.4 Ghz P4 HT 
with a FireGL card and it struggles to play 4 640x480 
Photo-jpeg QT clips at 30fps.  The CPU load on a 
HyperThreaded machine is misleading as Windows thinks there 
are two actual CPUs which isn't the case.  So 50% load 
usually means the thing is hammered.

Texturing performance under Windows seems pretty awful and 
DirectShow and Quicktime aren't much better.  I'm looking 
into improving things...

On 12/12/05, Nuno Godinho <eu@nunogodinho.com> wrote:
    
Hi,

I am running 4 videos and I want to fade between them. 
      
Moving a MIDI 
    
slider (ctlin 0..127) I assign a range to each video 
      
(0..30, 30..60, 
    
60..90,
90..127) and then fade between them.

Although the logic is working, the performance is unacceptable. The 
CPU is only running at 40% but the videos look slow and the 
transitions aren't smooth.

I figured this is because 4 simultaneous films is too much 
      
for GEM in my PC.
    
So I implemented a way to turn off each film when its transparency 
equals 0 since it is not showing anyway.

The problem now is that when I send "1" or "0" to gemhead 
      
to turn it 
    
on/off I sometimes get a delay of over 1 second before that 
      
video turns on or off.
    
Here attached I send my patches. "vela.pd" is the main one.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Nuno


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