Quicktime Alternative for Movies on XP request
It is understandable for the purposes of cross-platform canoodling that using the Quicktime API for movie handling would be the best option for Jitter. However, with the recent troublesome Quicktime 7.0 release it raises the question of whether a native movie loader and recorder for XP wouldn't be more appropriate. I'm trying to build applications that use audio and video from movie clips, and seem to be at loggerheads with Quicktime (6.5 and 7.0) The most responsive video applications on XP do not use the Quicktime API for playback of films. I feel the addition of a native XP movie loader object would result in performance improvements equivalent to the recent jit.dx objects.
yes, a jit.avi.movie would be SWEET indeed.
p.
We have no plans at this time to make a DirectX movie player, though
there should be nothing preventing a third party developer from
coding one.
However, I might suggest that you make use of @colormode uyvy with
the slab shader posted in the following thread. This will provide you
with the optimal playback of QT movies in Jitter on PC. I would also
suggest using the Photo JPEG codec, since in our tests, this has
excellent CPU performance and high quality frame accurate playback. h.
264 while having excellent bitrate, is measurably slower to decompress.
Note that the download link got munged in our forum import and should
be:
http://www.synthesisters.com/download/incremental/jit.gl.sla b-uyvy-
pc.zip
-Joshua
I understand there are a variety of things that would take precedence over a platform specific external.
UVUY isn't of much use to me until ALL of the Jitter objects support a UVUY mode. Yes, it would help if I was simply playing a movie to a texture, but I wouldn't have speed difficulties if that's all I was up to. I'm running Indeo and PJPEG compression, and both are very zippy.
I guess the analogy I would draw is that running through Quicktime on a PC is like using a fork in China. Sure, it works, but most people already have a set of chopsticks around that they can use more efficiently. I'd feel more comfortable giving someone a standalone that I build without having to teach them the arcane art of finding and altering Quicktime settings to make sure it works properly. Or ditching Itunes and downgrading to 6.5 to have audio playback.
I probably wouldn't even be complaining/requesting if Quicktime hadn't turned into the unwieldy monster that is 7.0
We're not likely to introduce a special DirectX-based Windows version
of Jitter, beyond refining those elements we already have. I'm sure
that you can imagine many of the reasons why. We're working on the
spigot~ issue (which, as has been repeatedly mentioned, is highly non-
trivial) for QuickTime 7, and, well, there you go.
jb