Cocoa, Flicker with animation when overlaying a NSWindow on a QTMovieView

Question

In a project that I am currently working on I have an transparent NSWindow overlayed on a QTMovieView. At certain points I slide a custom view into this child window with animation so that it is displayed over the movie for a short period of time. The only odd behavior is that the animation is smooth on a Mac Book Pro but on a Mac Book(Same OS-X Version) there is significant flicker. The flicker only occurs on the portion of the window that has the actual QTMovie behind it.

Has anyone seen this behavior before or found a way to work around it?

Answer 1

The older MacBooks don't have real video hardware and used shared memory, so it's probably an issue with a slow video card trying to update @ 30fps. Have you tried smaller movies to see if the issue goes away?

You may be better off with a pipeline like in the QTCoreVideo101 sample code from Apple. That would be a bit more work, you'd have to take care of the animation yourself, but you would get ultimate control over what is being drawn.