Real time video playback

Hi, I’ve been using max for a few months now, let’s of fun.

Only thing that did not satisfy me so far is the performance with video playback in real time.. and I’m almost sure that there’s a way to optimize my patcher.

I don’t have any patcher for you to look at but it’s quite simple, I’m using something similar to this video player to cue my videos, because that’s what I started with: http://cycling74.com/2009/04/06/the-video-processing-system-part-3/

I’m using midi notes from another software to trigger different frames of a single video clip… the thing is.. sometimes it gets fast and the video can’t follow… I had trouble on a lot of machines that weren’t that fast.. but I’m also having this same problem on my quad core machine with 8gb of ram and with very compressed low quality video.. :(

I understand that the video plays back from the hard drive directly and that’s why it’s slow and unreliable.. Now that you know my situation, here are my questions:

How to load my video in ram and play it from there, what are the objects that I’m looking for there? (like the jitter equivalence of the msp buffer and groove objects, you know)

Also, is there a way to save what is being played in real time to a video file? … an effective way of doing it? I’m not looking for hd material.. but I’d like some 640×480 if possible.. on a good computer…

Thanks.