Specs: about 320 x 270 px, 5 seconds. I don't know exactly how many images needed for a fluid animation, but let's assume 30.
What would be the best way to playback this? As a movie file in some kind of quicktime view (if available), or as an animated image sequence with UIImageView? I'm not sure but I believe loading 30 images per second is nearby impossible on the ipod touch. Any idea?
Best Answer
In general, a movie will have applied some compression and possibly even used a lossy compression. This means the processor would need to work harder but it has a lot less memory to read. The CPU is a fast resource. Compared to the CPU, memory is slow. Thus a compressed movie would (logically) have the better performance.
In practice, it could depend on a lot of factors, although movies do tend to be better optimized for animations. With a slow CPU and extremely fast memory, a multi-image animation might just be faster. Also, it depends on how you store those many images. But in 99% of all situations, movies will have better performance.