QT Movies playing roughly

[Graham Samuel]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 13:08:11 -0500  Howard Bornstein 
<bornstein at designeq.com> wrote:
>
>This may be a bit odd but maybe, if the cause is that your computer is
>underpowered, you can ease its burden by setting the playrate of the
>player to a value lower than 1. This will cause the movie to play slower,
>which may give it a smoother appearance.
>
>Unfortunately, this screws up the soundtrack, which means you may have to
>separate the soundtrack into a different file and play it simultaneously
>with the movie. If it doesn't need to be "synced" to the movie, though,
>this might work.

Thanks Howard, but the idea of these movies is to show something 
specific by speed variations (it's an electrical simulation, so that 
the more 'volts' that are applied to the object shown in the movie, 
the faster it moves, etc. And if the polarity is reversed, the movie 
goes into reverse - these effects can be achieved in a few lines of 
script for a QT movie). The change of sound pitch with the different 
speeds adds to the realism of the movie, so that's OK. However what I 
want is that the movie plays according to spec, I mean if my script 
demands that it's 15 fps then it should be 15, not 15, 15, 12, 3, 0, 
0 , 0, 15 at successive intervals, which is what I'm getting now.

What I really can't understand is why the movies should play roughly 
from within the Revolution environment, but normally when run by the 
QuickTime Movie Player on the same machine - isn't the QT Player just 
a different wrapper around the API that the Revo engine uses? BTW, 
these movies worked fine on quite early PowerPC chips (I am rewriting 
an old SuperCard app as a training exercise, so the movies have been 
around quite a time).

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 06:44:06 -0600  "Chipp Walters" <chipp at chipp.com> wrote:
>
>Graham,
>
>Are you using any "on idle" handlers to control the animation?
>
>You might also want to look at an animaged gif for this type of thing.
>Also, look at the 'send' command instead of 'on idle' (if you're using it).
>

Chipp, thanks for your interest - Nope, there are absolutely no 'on 
idle' handlers in my code as far as I know. While the movie is 
playing, the app isn't doing anything at all apart from waiting for 
mouse activity within the Revo engine.

I'm not too familiar with the details of animated gifs, but I'm not 
sure that the speed variations, reverses and sound tracks could be 
generated with the same simplicity as with a QT movie. QT seems to be 
absolutely made for the job.

Gentlemen, I'm sure there is an explanation, and I would take a bet 
that it lies with my own stupidity, but I haven't spotted it yet.

Graham
-- 
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          Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France