Filestream node audio and video

I am fighting with the filestream node.

I managed to ‘preload’ a video to make it start quasi instantly, by using 2 filestream nodes, a “Cons (Texture)” node and some switching to select the video that I want.

When I start to play a video, I get some black frames, because the audio starts playing and only after the first few milliseconds have passed, the first video frame is actually drawn. Before that, the VideoTexture node outputs a black texture. This is annoying, since it makes it impossible to switch between video’s without a few black frames (which can be noticed). A workaround is to play the hidden video file until the first frame is drawn, but the you throw away the first 40ms of the audio (if 25fps), which is A LOT…

This doesn’t seem very logical to me, I would expect that the first frame is drawn on ms 0 (at the same time as the audio starts), instead of the first frame being drawn only AFTER the according audio has been played.

Is this a bug? Is it in the hands of vvvv to change this behaviour or do we depend on directshow?

i’d say yes. maybe your codec introduces the “pre-lag”. have you tried other codecs which are suitable for realtime? also this: faq-av ;)

I am using ffdshow and xvid, seems like a very conservative choice to me.

Also looping doesn’t work well.
When I use the loop pins, it doesn’t always jump back to ‘Start Time’ but quite often it jumps back to 0, and then sometimes to start time again. Also, posiyion sometimes doesn’t reflect the position, and stays at endtime for 1 run, then it behaves correctly again.

No matter what I do, when seeking or looping, I hardly ever jump to the new position straightaway, without staying at the same position for at least 2 vvvv frames (sometimes even 10). My last test was using a very small xvid with all I-frames, so it shouldn’t matter which position I seek to.

So for example when I seek to 1.000 seconds, the position will almost always be 1.000 for at least 2 vvvv-frames.

Filestream2 has never worked for me until now (beta24). Now it does something, and it seems to behave somewhat faster than Filestream in some cases, but I get no audio… And it also takes about 10 vvvv frames when seeking to position 0 (which should always be an I-frame I suppose). Strange…

its all a codec thing, xvid is only good for straight video playback. we always recommend the picvid mjpg codec, but the ffdshow mjpg should work as well.