which max version are you using ? since 7 it's probably better to use jit.movie than jit.qt.movie, which is deprecated. Also in your patch, the (time $1, bang) message is connected to a (read test.m4v) message and not to the 2d jit.qt.movie, so it does nothing else than reloading the movie test.m4v at each qmetro bang (so ≈ each 32 ms), the problem is probably here.

i would use framedump for this kind of analysis operation. (jit.qt.movie is not exactly deprecated, it's simply an alias for jit.movie)

Thank you very much for this Rob. You're awesome.

Good to learn about some objects and methods that are less familiar to me,

Interesting results.