On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Geoff Canyon wrote:
> First: Woo Hoo!
>
> Now, the comments:
>
> All of this is on a 128 MB B&W PowerMac G3 400 with OS 8.6 and QuickTime
> 4.03, MetaCard v 2.3a4, with 16MB of RAM assigned to it. I played a
> straightforward QuickTime movie in it, and it worked fine, until I set
> the alwaysbuffer property to true. Then the movie turned dead (continuing
> to play if it had been), and wouldn't respond until I turned off
> alwaysbuffer for it.
This is a "feature": the controller doesn't work if alwaysBuffer is
set to true (how could it? The movie isn't attached to the window
it's drawing in and so can't get any events at all). You can still
start and stop the movie with scripts, as in "start player 1" and
"pause player 1", though.
> I played a basic sprite movie in it, and it performed admirably. It did a
> better job of hogging the processor than QuickTime Player does, allowing
> the sprite movie to play at a better frame rate. Some would argue that
> QuickTime Player is being a better citizen; I didn't put MetaCard in the
> background to see if it would back off on CPU usage.
This actually a worse problem under Windows, where movies with
continuous effects can make the application almost totally
unresponsive. We're still looking for ways to limit the amount of CPU
time QT uses in these cases.
> I played a different sprite movie, and saw some artifacts when it played,
> mostly at the bottom and around the edges. Not unliveable, but
> unfortunate. A sample of the movie can be found at
Not sure about the border problem. Did you have showBorder set to
true?
As for the junk at the bottom, it's where the controller goes and you
can work around the problem by setting the showController property to
true. The player (or even QT itself) should do this automatically,
but so far we've been unable to come up with a reliable way to
distinguish movies that have these problems.
> http://www.inspiredlogic.com/qt/invasion.mov
>
> I even tried resizing the movie; it continued to play as well as before.
> This movie was far more challenging than the first; it involves rotating
> graphics, tracking the mouse position, playing midi sounds, and finally,
> launching a URL at a certain point. All of this worked fine.
>
> Then, in trying out a different movie, I noticed that the dialog to
> choose a file for the player to display was showing me all sorts of
> different files, including applications. So, feeling dangerous, I chose
> an application. MetaCard froze. Got what I deserved, but it would be
> good to filter that dialog to appropriate files. :-)
This doesn't happen here. Maybe it's the difference between A4 and
A5. As for filtering, it's not really a good option because one of
the great things about QuickTime is that it can read so many different
formats and it'd be a shame to restrict the options unnecessarily.
Regards,
Scott
> gc
>
> Geoff Canyon
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Your child can learn to read using the classics of children's literature.
> Check out C.D. Caterpillar: <http://www.inspiredlogic.com/cd/>
>
>
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
