Why does my movie slowdown while my wallpaper changes?

[sra. Aguirre]

First of all my apologies if this has already been asked in some other thread. I searched and searched and could not find it.

My question is about graphics. I have my desktop preferences set to change wallpapers every five minutes. While watching a movie in Quicktime Pro today, I noticed that when the wallpaper changes my movie frames slow down.

It's very short, maybe a second or so, after that I watch the movie just normal.

Is this normal? Or what could be causing this?

 

[UltraNEO*]

First of all my apologies if this has already been asked in some other thread. I searched and searched and could not find it.

My question is about graphics. I have my desktop preferences set to change wallpapers every five minutes. While watching a movie in Quicktime Pro today, I noticed that when the wallpaper changes my movie frames slow down.

It's very short, maybe a second or so, after that I watch the movie just normal.

Is this normal? Or what could be causing this?

What is the resolution and approximate file sizes are the actual images your using for the wallpaper? If they're huge, then this could explain it - you can try resizing the images to coincide with the desktop size, save then in a more compressed form - this reduce the load.

 

[Firefly2002]

No offense, but are you serious? Why do you think? Wallpaper changes don't come free of charge.... they eat up CPU cycles. I would have thought that obvious.

When playing a movie, which also uses CPU cycles, you run into slowdowns.

 

[sra. Aguirre]

Hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllp

No offense, but are you serious? Why do you think? Wallpaper changes don't come free of charge.... they eat up CPU cycles. I would have thought that obvious.

When playing a movie, which also uses CPU cycles, you run into slowdowns.

Hi thanks for your reply very useful information and I am certainly taking that into consideration although....

I had to take 3 minutes to let it sink in, not because of your answer but because I noticed that on this forum, which I am sure consists of 90% very experienced and technical Mac users, there is this tendency of users getting annoyed whenever a so called stupid question is asked or repeated.

I know I should not give you the full load, because you answered and apologized while addressing my ignorance.....but hey aren't forums to ask questions, maybe even very stupid ones? That's how I learn, right? And will never ever again ask such an obvious thing!

I found myself twice in doubt if I were going to ask this here on this forum, afraid of annoying the Techies over here.

Bottom line, THANK YOU for the effort!!!

 

[amarcus]

Whoa, with a modern day core 2 duo playing a standard (not HD) video uses only a fraction of the CPU. Same goes with changing a wallpaper, it's definitely not the CPU unless its shoddy programming on apples part which I doubt. The bottleneck is most likely the HDD. If you could adjust the file buffer in quicktime I would imagine you could get rid of the stutter. I'm pretty sure you can do this in VLC - might be worth giving that a shot?

Depends how much you care about a tiny bit of stutter...

Adam

 

[sra. Aguirre]

thanks

Thanks Adam,

VERY helpful info!