[PD] project help and suggestions

Martin Eckart imartron at gmail.com
Wed Aug 25 01:32:03 CEST 2010


Hi all,

I'm working on a project that I'd like some technical input on in order
to make it more efficient than I have it.  For reference I'm working
with PD-Extended on Ubuntu 10.4.

I have a digital camera taking jpeg images at regular (2 or 3 second)
intervals which download automatically to a directory on my laptop
(connected via usb using gphoto2).  I want to load those images into pd
using gem for display onscreen as well as some other analysis.

Now the way I have it right now, each time an image is downloaded a hook
script converts it to 1 frame of mpeg2 video and gets concatenated to
the end of a cumulative mpeg video file.  In pd, I load the video with
pix_film and display it.  This works reasonably well, however, I need to
load the same video again in order to get the most recent images and
that reload makes video playback stutter (not bad but enough to notice).
Does anyone have any suggestions on other ways I could go about this?
Some thoughts I have so far:

1) maybe pix_film has a 'reload' or similar option to just load the
newest frames?
2) maybe there's a way to play it as if it's a streaming video and just
load the newest frames as they come?
3) maybe pix_image is more what I'm looking for?  Forget the encoding to
video and just load each image individually to a buffer?  I think this
can be problematic since there will be hundreds of images and loading
them all to RAM will get too big for my paltry 2gb.

I'm grateful for any of your suggestions.

Cheers,
-martin




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