What I really want to do is be able to select individual frames in a movie, but the threads I've read suggest that's not possible.  So the closest I can get is to divide the frame I want by the frame rate and jump to that time code.

There doesn't seem to be a way of requesting the frame rate (setting it doesn't seem override whatever the file believes) and I want to save the manual work of opening the movie in QT and looking up the frame rate manually, so I thought I could measure it doing something like this:
Code:

x=theMovie.time();
for(i=0;i<j;i++)
  {
    theMovie.read();
  }
println("Average spf: " + (theMovie.time()-x)/j );
 

Turns out I get very different numbers depending on the value of j, even when j is in the hundreds.  Furthermore, I get different results when I run the exact same code multiple times.

I figured it was because the frame loading is async to the control thread, so I tried changing the inner loop to:
Code:

theMovie.read();while(!(theMovie.available())); 

That just looped forever.  Looking at the reference material for "while" it seems to imply that nothing else happens outside the while loop while the loop is executing.

Finally, I figured I'd try this:
Code:

theMovie.read();while(!(theMovie.available())){delay(1);}; 

and I'm still having no luck-- delay appears to seize all cycles, not yield to other processes.

How do I handle this?