Smoothest way to play a series of movies?

[Trevor DeVore]

On Oct 10, 2004, at 10:28 PM, iMP wrote:
>
> What's the smoothest way to play a series of QT-compatible movie 
> files? I've tried a few ways, like putting a player on each card, one 
> per file, but the transition is very noticeable, and the players don't 
> behave as expected. I have about 20 12mb movs to play, each about 2 
> minutes of the entire movie, and I also need to skip around to various 
> parts of the entire movie.
>
> The best way I've tried so far gets a list of files from a folder, and 
> uses one card and one player. When a playStopped is sent, the next 
> filename is set for the player. I've tried various lockScreen tactics, 
> but the abruptness and delay of the transition is still very 
> noticeable.
>
> Another way might be to make a QT "reference movie" to the series of 
> files from scratch, and set a player to that, but I don't know if 
> that's possible with Revolution...

You have a couple options depending on your needs.  Your best results 
will come if you use one player object that plays back all of the 
movies.  So the question becomes whether or not you know the order and 
names of movies that you need to play during authoring or if it will be 
decided while the user is using your program.

If you already know the order that the movies will be played back in 
then you could create a reference movie using QT Pro.  This just 
consists of creating a new player and then opening all of your movies 
and copying and pasting them one after the other into the new player.  
The save the new player making sure to "Save as a reference movie".  
You would then load this "reference movie" into the Revolution player 
object.  If you don't have QT Pro you could also use SMIL to create 
your playlist or use the EnhancedQT external 
<http://mangomultimedia.com/developer/revolution/> which allows you to 
do the same thing as QuickTime Pro but from within Revolution.

If you are creating the list of movies dynamically then I would 
probably use SMIL.  This allows you to generate a text file that tells 
QT what order to play the movies in.  You could create this in Rev and 
the load the text file into a player object.  You can find information 
on it here <http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authoring/qtsmil.html>.

-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com