[PD] DirectShow pix_film unusable - was: Re: GEM: forcing the use of Quicktime with pix_flim??

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

Hi,

So does anybody use [pix_film] on Windows with DirectShow (as opposed to 
QuickTime) and get decent performance?

Whenever I send an [open ( message to a pix_film, it starts eating up a 
lot of CPU and it never stops afterwards, even if I send it [auto 0( 
and/or disconnect the gemhead from it.
More than a couple of [pix_film] lead to an unusable patch.

I have tried with a couple more codecs (besides DV-PAL: namely 
"animation" and h264) with DirectShow and the same happens, so it is not 
something specific to DV-PAL.

If I use QuickTime (thanks to the list for hints to force gem to use 
Quicktime) everything goes smooth. Isn't it strange? Chris wrote:

 > On Windows, DirectShow is typically much, much faster than Quicktime
 > (which Apple abandoned a while back).

I also tried ffdshow-tryout codecs as Chris suggested but nothing changed.

thanks
m.

Matteo Sisti Sette escribió:
> Hi,
> 
> With the latest release of Gem pix_film eats about ten or twenty time 
> more CPU than a precompiled binary compiled in August 2006 that I 
> downloaded time ago. And it eats so much cpu after opening a file no 
> matter whether it is playing it or not (I mean even after disconnecting 
> the gemhead from it). That didn't happen in the 2006 version
> 
> So I've realised that with the 2006 version of gem, it uses QUICKTIME, 
> while when I use the latest version it uses DIRECTSHOW.
> 
> Digging into the patch (which I wrote a couple of years ago for the 2006 
> version) I notice I opened files with a message like this:
> [open myfile.mov 1(
> 
> That "1" is undocumented in the current help patches, but iirc I used it 
> in order to force [pix_film] to use quicktime rather than directshow.
> 
> Was that feature removed?
> If so, is there another way to force gem to use quicktime rather 
> directshow?
> I'd like to test with quicktime to figure out whether this absurdly huge 
> cpu consumption is due to the use of DirectShow as opposed to Quicktime, 
> or if it is just a bug introduced in some recent version of Gem.
> 
> thanks
> m.
> 
> 


-- 
Matteo Sisti Sette
matteosistisette at gmail.com
http://www.matteosistisette.com