Data Type: Movie ()

Description:

This data module stores a movie description. The general concept of movies is described in the manual section of the Movie Player module.

Connections:

Master
If this port is connected to a Movie Player modules result port, this movie can be used as destination movie during a movie conversion process.

Ports:

Number of streams

Select the requested number of streams. After this, the appropriate number of the following file name fields will appear.

Stream1

Source specification of the image sequence for stream one. This may be an movie data file ( .amovstream ), a single image file or a sequence of images specified by a wildcard expression. For example specify c:/mymovie/left*.jpg to get all JPEG-images from directory c:/mymovie starting with "left" in the filename. Possible wildcards are * and ?. * matches a sequence of arbitrary characters. ? matches a single character. If specifying an movie data file (which is an -specific file containing a series of images) wildcards are not permitted. For experts: to specify a whole list of wildcard patterns or single image files edit the movie info file ( .amov ).

Stream2

Identical to above for stream number 2.

Stream3

Identical to above for stream number 3.

Stream4

Identical to above for stream number 4.

Type

Select here how the Movie Player module has to interpret and render the final image sequence.

• mono: every image forms a single frame.
• stereo: two images form a stereo frame.
• stereo(interlaced): every image forms a stereo frame. The left eye channel is stored in the even lines and the right in the odd lines. Internally the module resorts the lines to get an image of the type stereo(up/down) .
• stereo(up/down): every image forms a stereo frame. The left eye channel is taken from the upper half of the image and the right from the lower one.
• stereo(left/right): every image forms a stereo frame. The left eye channel is taken from the left half of the image and the right from the right one.

Render method

This option affects the playback behavior. If set to GLdraw, the images are copied directly to the OpenGL frame buffer by using the function glDrawPixels(). If set to texture, the images are first transferred into an OpenGL texture object and then rendered as polygons textured with this texture. If an image was compressed using the OpenGL texture compression feature by a preceding movie conversion process, this image gets rendered as textured polygon independently of how this port is set. Be warned, that OpenGL texture compression is not available for all systems. On PC systems OpenGL texture compression seems to be a standard, due to the limited bandwidth and memory storage. Which render method performs better depends on the individual hardware and software conditions.

Aspect ratio

Force the aspect ratio of the rendered images to a fixed value. If set to 0 the aspect ratio is taken from the individual image resolutions.

Swap stereo

Swap left and right images for stereo movies.

Flip

Flip the movie in X- and/or Y-direction.

Max fps

Limit the playback speed to a maximal value of frames per second. Set this value also if the movie playback looks jerky, that gives the content retrieval more time between the single frames. A value of 0 disables this feature.

Max threads

On multiprocessor systems, the image retrieval and decompression is performed by default with as many threads as processors are available. That gives much speed but can hamper other users or tasks on this machine. Set this option to a value greater than 0 (which is to disable limitations) to change the number of retrieval threads. Set this to 1 if the movie includes images read by non thread-safe readers.