[PD] Many clips in Gem, best way to deal?

[Ben Bogart - FMPM/F1999]

Hello all,

we're having a performance (opening) in 10 days and have run into a 
little problem.

We are using gem to call up and play a base of movie clips (about 150 
each at 512x256 cinepak) I did a test with 15 movie clips and came to an 
awful realization (under windows 2k):

after 4 hours of running everything looked find in the window, video 
still playing fast and nice. Then I looked at the system resources. PD 
was using 500MB RAM and 1.5GB Virtual Memory. After 5 hours PD 
died(quit). 

So this thing is supposed to run for at least 5 hours, at best 3 days 
straight. 

The way the patch works is that it sending a "open" message to a single 
pix_movie at a metro's whim. There are 15 such "open" messages called 
randomly. Is PD using so much memory because it keeps each clip in memory 
after the pix_movie has opened another one? Even when it loads the same 
clip twice it seems to be keeping multiple coppies in memory? 

So the question is, what do I do about it? Whats the most efficient way 
to run many video clips on one primitive object (rectangle) Is there a 
way of loading all the clips into memory first and then calling each one 
out of memory when needed? Or is there a way of clearing the buffer 
everytime a new clip is loaded?

I'm trying now to get gem .87 test2 to work on linux, just to keep the 
thing from crashing... (I have 640MB RAM and 500MB swap space for linux) 

any pointers would be appriciated... I'm now in the hunt for lmpeg3 can't 
find it with apt, any quick suggestions?

Thanks!
Ben+ekran





B. Bogart
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