Seriously though, what I mean is that when the gang of people who write the operating system and quicktime do there thing, they are trying to optimise it for 95 percent of the users. There is a lot of components in both hardware and software that have to interact flawlessly each time to make it all work.

I think that despite how powerful the current hardware has become there are still little tricks and compromises being made to make things look smooth. My guess would be that Catalyst playback performance is not high on their list of priorities. In the ideal world quicktime is tailored just to our needs and they work out those little tricks in our favour with regard to high speed random drive playback. However in the overall scheme of things we are a tiny user base doing something outside the norm.

I guess my point is this, there is so much going on between Catalyst and the hardware that is out of Richard's hands and the hardware manufacturers that just having the latest kit doesn't necessarily mean it will all work smoothly all of the time. We are probably the only group testing it under these conditions and some of it is just unknown territory. Software developers and Hardware manufacturers just don't get the time to extensively test every scenario. They just have to go for what keeps most of the people happy most of the time.

Cheers

Toby