Hey, I''m working on a game, in which I need to display video. For several reasons, the video needs to be in a raw format, and read in at runtime. (Windows) To display, I use a buffer of 20 frames. On initialisation I fill them all. When the game requests a frame from the videomanager, it gets a frame of this buffer (a pointer to it). When the videomanager has given out the first 10 frames, it spawns a new thread, to read in the next 10 frames from disk, and puts it in the first half of the buffer. When the videomanager reaches the end of its buffer, it spawns a new thread to fill the last 10 frames of the buffer. Inside the thread, I use this fread call to get the data, after I''ve set the file to use __IONBF io. (I only set the buffertype once) bytesToRead=640*480*2*10 // 2=16 bits, 10=size of half a buffer // 640x480 is resolution. fread(mybuffer,1,bytesToRead,pFileHandle); I''d be very interested in hearing ideas on optimizing my datareading method, as it is more choppy than I like, and I can''t help the feeling that it can be implemented faster. In order to try to not get multiple threads doing io on the same file at the same time, (in the fear of speed penalties for the harddrive''s seektime), I do not spawn a new readthread untill the old one is ready. (In this case, the videomanager just feeds the game the same image as last time, when the game requests a videoframe) Thanks, Lucas

Hey Jan.

Thanks for the tips. I''ve started implementing them yesterday.

I''m now using CreateFile and ReadFileEx for my input and output.
This is my CreateFile call:

::CreateFile(pObj->pFilename,
GENERIC_READ,
FILE_SHARE_READ,
NULL,
OPEN_ALWAYS,
FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING | FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED | FILE_FLAG_SEQUENTIAL_SCAN,
NULL);

Specifying sequential, unbuffered, async io.
It performs much better.

Your third comment I couldn''t find any info on. Is doing a ReadFileEx() a ''deep request'' ? If not, how do I issue one?. In my current implementation, I always make sure the previous ReadFileEx() command has completed before finishing a new one. I''ve tried setting it to allow two simultaneous, but didn''t see a performance difference.

Thanks,

Lucas

I decided to store the video raw, because in this game, the cpu is extremely busy doing all sorts of stuff, mainly taking the video as input. The CPU is absolutely the bottleneck for me. If I turn off the reading of ''new'' video frames, I have exactly the same fps, as when the hd is loading in the background.

I''ve taken Jan''s suggestions, and switched to CreateFile and ReadFileEx. Then I discovered that win98 doesn''t support overlapped io.. So now I use CreateFile() and ReadFile(), but I have a seperate thread do the blocking ReadFile() call.

The thread that does the reading runs this in its main function:

do
{
SleepEx(INFINITE,1);
if (readThreadStop) return 0;
readThreadBusy=1;
ReadFile(file,readThreadBuffer,readThreadBytesToRead,&bytesRead,0);
if (bytesRead!=readThreadBytesToRead)
{
SetFilePointer(file,0,0,FILE_BEGIN);
ReadFile(file,(char*)readThreadBuffer+bytesRead,readThreadBytesToRead-bytesRead,&bytesRead,0);
}
readThreadBusy=0;
} while (1);

so it sleeps, reads, sleeps reads.. When it sleeps it gets called out of that by the mainthread using QueueUserAPC(), which fills the readThreadBytesToRead and readThreadBuffer with new values.

Problem is that it still crashes on win98. I''m trying to figure out what it is I''m doing that is unsupported on win98. My guess goes out to the QueueuserAPC() call, but MSDN has no mention of that not working on earler windows version..

Any clues?

Bye, Lucas