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FreeFrame Plugins

What's FreeFrame?

FreeFrame is an open-source standard for visual effect plugins. It was created to allow plugins to be used by any application that supports the FreeFrame standard. MidiVid GPU is one such application.

For more information about FreeFrame, including free downloadable plugins, visit http://freeframe.sourceforge.net

Using FreeFrame Plugins

In order to use FreeFrame plugins within MidiVid GPU, you need to tell the application where to find your FreeFrame plugins. You do this on the MIDI / FreeFrame tab of the Performance Options dialog. Once you've set your FreeFrame plugin path (and restarted MidiVid GPU if you just changed it) any FreeFrame plugins found in the folder you've chosen should appear in the choose plugin list when you assign a note.

FreeFrame Plugin Performance

MidiVid GPU uses the video card to do just about everything, so it tries to put video frames into video memory as soon as possible, often right after decompressing them from disk. MidiVid GPU also uses the built-in pixel processing horsepower of your graphics card to do all the video processing. This makes it really fast. FreeFrame plugins, on the other hand, are written to work in a broad variety of applications, and as such are written in a very general way. FreeFrame plugins operate on video frames stored in your main memory, not the memory of your video card, and they process them with your CPU, which just can't keep up with the pixel-power of a graphics card. This is not to say that FreeFrame plugins are horribly slow, they're just slower than MidiVid GPU plugins.

Another issue is that while moving data to the video card is very fast, getting it back from the video card is very slow. When using FreeFrame plugins in MidiVid, you may find the speed of the plugins much lower than that of the built-in MidiVid GPU plugins. This will vary depending on the plugin you use, and will be more of an issue if you try to use more than one FreeFrame plugin at the same time.

You can improve the situation by using only using file-based data sources with FreeFrame plugins, like AVI's, BMP's, and so on. Video-data based sources, like capture devices or the Framebuffer Loopback device will likely be slower.

You will also find that FreeFrame plugins are much faster at lower display resolutions, as the amount of video memory that needs to be transferred is much smaller. This is also true of MidiVid GPU plugins, but to a lesser degree.