[PD] Gem testing

[chris clepper]

On Nov 4, 2004, at 4:40 PM, shreeswifty wrote:
> 4 - 3.5 GB MOVIES with a patch mixing and alpha channeling the films 
> and moving the stuff with midi
>
> With 090, it stutters and skips because i assume it's trying to play 
> back the audio on the Quicktime as well?
> With 888pre the behavior is a little better
> With the April 087 CVS they all play back smooth as silk, but of 
> course no audio, which is fine for me

Those findings go counter to the work we did improving the player 
objects.  0.87 has some big problems playing long clips which were 
fixed by late last year/early this year (around 0.888).  The current 
version is designed to play multiple DV clips at once very smoothly 
using 'auto 1' and 'rate $1', which is something 0.87 did not do well.

One thing to try is toggling 'hiquality 0/1' since I did change how 
that defaulted.  Also, use pix_movie if you don't have any processing 
to do as 'client_storage' works better than with pix_film + 
pix_texture.  With 4 clips going, client_storage will make a noticeable 
difference.

You mention the alpha channel and doing any RGBA work on the CPU is 
going to slow everything down 3-400% or more because of the YUV->RGB 
conversion.  Do any alpha manipulations using OpenGL, and keep in mind 
that nearly every alpha option can be done in YUV apart from actually 
storing the alpha (in many cases the alpha is used as a surrogate Y 
anyway).

> i notice the SIZE of the Gem.pd_darwin is now near 17MBs and the CVS87 
> is near 3MBs

That is due to the static linking of the text libraries on OSX.  Also, 
many objects were added, and the code improvements like loop unrolling 
add some size as well.

> I am on OSX 10.3 g4 laptop 1024 all that.

On my 1Ghz laptop, I can play 3 NTSC DV clips smoothly using pix_movie, 
and a fourth would be possible if I wasn't using the internal 4200 rpm 
drive.

cgc