[PD] GEM: pix_movie loss of quality with new version (old version was OK but crashed)

Matteo Sisti Sette matteo.sistisette at email.it
Fri Jun 15 00:42:44 CEST 2007


Hi,

I already posted this to the gem-dev list, but maybe some user here knows a 
solution or workaround... I found the same question in the archives, dating 
back to a few years ago, which remained unanswered.

I'm using GEM with PD Vanilla 0.40.1 on Windows XP.

Up to a few days ago I was using gem-0.90.1-W32-i686-bin, believing it was 
the latest version.
With that version, pix_movie sometimes crashes when opening an avi file, if 
it had previously opened another one (or the same one). It also crashes 
sometimes when closing/opening a patch, creating/destroying the gemwin, or 
closing PD. Very unstable.

Now I have installed gem-CVS20060412-NT-i686-bin
It is stable, but the video is rendered at a lower quality. I'm testing the 
same patch with the same videos on the same machine.
It is NOT displaying only solid colors. Colors are fine. It rather looks 
like as if the movie was encoded with more compression or with a worse 
encoder than it indeed is. Or maybe as if it had a lower resolution.
It used to look just fine with the older version of GEM.

The movie is being mapped on a rectangle which fits the windows with the 
same size as the movie, i.e. one pixel of the movie to one pixel of the 
screen: there should be no interpolation involved. Also, the movie are not 
interlaced.

However, the really relevant thing is that the older GEM version rendered 
the video just fine, at its full quality, while the new version is degrading 
quality. Any idea why?


By the way, I tried version gem-CVS20060914-W32-i686-bin but that doesn't 
work at all: it renders a white rectangle, and outputs the message "GL: 
invalid enumeration" at every frame.


Is there any version available that renders at full quality AND doesn't 
crash?


I really need to reload video files at times. I have to use a huge lot of 
video along the performance, but the performance is split into parts, each 
using 15-20 videos (no more than 3 simultaneously, but randomly switching 
among all the 15-20 ones at any moment).
My only workaround in order to avoid loading new videos in the same 
pix_movie object, was to have a huge lot of pix_movie objects with their 
file opened since the beginning, and just activate them when needed. It 
doesn't work because the memory start trashing when the 40-50-th movie is 
accessed, and eventually it even crashes PD!

The new version solves all this as it allows me to safely reload movies, but 
the loss of quality is just unacceptable for the performance. I'm not 
decorating amazing 3D shapes with coloured videos. I'm just reproducing high 
quality video at its full size.


Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance
m. 

 
 
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