Best way to show image sequence as a movie in Adobe AIR

Question

I need to show an image sequence as a movie in an Adobe AIR application - i.e. treat lots of images as video frames and show the result. For now I am going to try simply loading them and displaying in a movie clip but this might be too slow. Any advanced ideas how to make it work? Images are located on a hard drive or very fast network share, so the bandwidth should be enough. There can be thousands of them, so preloading everything to memory doesn't seem feasible.

Adobe AIR is not 100% decided, I am open to other ideas how to create a cross-platform desktop application for this purpose quickly enough.

Answer 1

You could have an image control as your movie frame, then load up a buffer of BitmapData objects. Fill the BitmapData objects with the images as they come in, and then call the image load function to load the next image in the buffer.

private drawNextImage(bitmapData:BitmapData):void {
movieFrame.load(new Bitmap(bitmmapData));
}

Answer 2

In case the images aren't big but you have a lots of them it can be interesting to group sequences on single bitmaps (à la mipmap). This way you can load in say, one bitmap containing say, 50 images forming 2 seconds of video playback at 25 fps.

This is method is specially useful online as you want to limit the amount of pings and handshakes causing slowness but I reckon it can also be useful in order to optimize loading, unloading and memory access.