good questions. i suspect you already read through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
What happens if I put Mip Map Count to “From File”-Mode. Does it fasten or slow the system?
if you need mipmaps they can give tremendous performance boosts when rendering small textured polygons. when not needed they are slower. you can try the performance implications by setting the MipFilter pin on the Filter node to different settings. Even when not used, they will slowdown loading, and consume memory as the image needs to be scaled several times.
“From File” specifies that all mipmaps get loaded from the file. Note that the more well known graphic formats like jpg, png or bmp all do not support mipmaps - so setting to “From File” in most cases equals to the setting 1mm. Only dds files support embedded mipmaps. Loading embedded mipmaps might be faster than calculating them during load.
Why are all amounts in “mm”. Is there any relationship to pixels?
no - the number specifies the number of mip levels.
Does the videotexture buffer?
no, it will just display the current frame of the video. it uses directshow to play back the video, so in case directshow does not deliver the right frame in time, it will not be there.
Depends the videotexture of the video framerate?
setting waitforframe to 1 will make vvvv wait until the videoframe is there. this usually makes sense, but it will slow down your patch to the frame rate of the video.
Animated texture vs Video: Is this faster than video, in general?
textures get played from the graphic cards ram (or if this is fully used, from the main memory) videos get played from disk and need to be decoded before they can be shifted to the graphic card. the performance difference is at least something like a factor of 1000. so go for textures whenever possible, but you will get only short loops in memory.
Or do you know an other fat Cpu-less Codec with small MBs
some of the older quicktime codecs seem to give good results - install quicktime alternative and try them.
FAQ Codecs is supposed to be a place to collect wisdom on these topics, but it seems to be not quite used - so please report your findings there - its a wiki!
