QT player object problems

[Terry Judd]

On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 10:10 AM, Graham Samuel wrote:

> I have a couple of player objects with QT movies in them. My user is 
> allowed to drag these player objects around the screen - during the 
> drag, the movies will not actually be playing. When the user lets go 
> the mouse, the movie begins to play in the loc it's ended up in,
>
> This is all very easy to accomplish in RR (for example using the 
> 'grab' command for the dragging), and I can add custom properties to 
> my player object and generally treat it like an image or a grc, apart 
> from two related problems:
>
> I can't buffer the player because if I do, RR ignores the masking on 
> the movies, and each one always gets a white rectangle around it 
> (people on the list told me the trick of switching off buffering to 
> allow the transparency to operate); but if buffering is not set, then 
> the drag process is incredibly jerky and slow in any machine below 
> about 500Mhz (I'm talking about Macs here, but I'm sure I'm going to 
> have the same problem on PCs). The only way I've thought of getting 
> around this is to use an image of the (stopped) movie in the drag part 
> of the program, and substitute it with the player object when I want 
> the movie to play. But this will be clumsy, will involve a lot more 
> code, and will give an inferior user experience because the movie will 
> always appear to stop at the same frame, which isn't the case now.
>
> Can anyone help with a better idea? Will either of these issues 
> (buffering, speed) go away in 2.0? I have still not ventured into the 
> 2.0 beta.

Why not forget about dragging the QT altogether and drag an outline 
graphic that is the same size and shape as your mask instead - you 
would only have to relocate the QT once on mouseup. I know this might 
not be ideal but we dragged windows around in pre OSX finders like this 
for years.

Terry...