hello,

I propose a replacement for the native movie class. I wrote it for my sister who needed to play a huge movie in realtime inside processing. it runs really smooth with about 30% cpu usage on my core2duo mbp.

I gave it all the methods of the native movie class (copied and pasted some code also) and some more:
- volume control (since sound works now)
- prossibility to write directly into the applet, saving 1 copy of the image data

also it works a tiny bit different: you have to repeatedly call task() on it to do the work, but that can be done nicely in draw(). one could also use a worker thread I suppose, but I wanted to avoid nasty race conditions.

also right now I use it as a file in the pde, and that for some reason doesnt allow me to declare Class type variables, so the call back does't work right now. but alternatively task() will return true if a new image was made so in draw you can do something like this:

draw()
{
 if (movie.task())
    //draw movie somewhere like any PImage
}

and due to single tasking you are guarantueed the image wont get overwritten while you work with it.

of course when it would be compiled natively as part of the movie toolbox the callback should also work (just 2 lines to uncomment in the constructor)

oh, and since I changed from grabbing single frames (which made slooow) to just playing the movie and have it deliver me frames I have no way right now to drop frames, so there is no fps setting, each frame will be rendered (as long as quicktime itself doesn't drop frames...does it?).

ah, and the file is at (no attachments here?):

http://danieloberhoff.de/processing/FasterMovie.pde

ah, the pre() hack is pretty cool, invisible single threaded magic .

one more remark: do NOT try to include processing.video.* (or processing.video.Movie to be more specific) since Movie collides with quicktime's Movie. I this should some time replace Movie in processing.video then I would propose calling it PMovie.

Cheers

You might also want to check out this thread: Slightly rewritten video.Movie library. It allows you to start utilizing PMovie.

I've been using it to avoid clashes in sketches where I use both MovieMaker and Quicktime movies.

Nice work! It's very fluid.

But it only plays once for me, even in loop. I'm a novice at Java and I tried to figure out how to change the code to make it repeat but to no avail. How could I implement this?

And would it be difficult to add the possibility of changing the source .mov? Have it play one movie for a while and then a mousePressed, for example, and it loads and plays a different movie.

Thanks.

ok, I got it, the problem was that it would never catch the end of the move but stop just before. update atz the old place:

http://danieloberhoff.de/processing/FasterMovie.pde

cheers

Hi,

I am not sure if this would really save so much work (saying mymovie.load(file) would probably be equivalent to mymovie = new FasterMovie(this,file), maybe you can sayve some lines by automatically stopping/restarting, but that would also make the code less readable imho).

But if you really need it what you have to do is factor out most of the stuff in the constructor into a load function and then call that from the constructor.

Cheers

Daniel

Ok, I assume that youd didn't break anything and just replaced the old version under:

http://danieloberhoff.de/processing/FasterMovie.pde

I hope I am not breaking anyone's Neck with this? Glad to hear that it is actually used, since it turned out for the original project that it was still too slow and we had to fall back to pure java and fight our private war with QTJ, no fun...

yes, there is fasterMovie.speed()
have not used it and don't know if it works though.