Why does the MOVIE function play the movie once before doing the repititions defined by n in MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)?

The following example, where M is the movie matrix and n is defined as 1, plays the movie twice:

movie(M,1)

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This enhancement has been incorporated in Release 2007a (R2007a). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

In MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a), the MOVIE function no longer displays each frame as it loads the data into memory. For previous releases, read the following:

The MOVIE function displays each frame as it loads the data into memory, and then plays the movie. This eliminates long delays with a blank screen when you load a memory intensive movie. The movie's load cycle is not considered one of the movie repetitions.

The ability to decide whether each frame should be displayed as it is loaded into memory is not available in MATLAB.

As a workaround you can choose that the movie not be played at all using the following code.

movie(M,0)

This way, you will only see the frames as they are being loaded into memory.

NOTE: You will not be able to change the frame rate, since that feature only affects the display of the movie and does not affect the loading of the data into memory.