BG Video alternative idea - feasable?

I've got a personal Pump it Up machine with a stock MK6 upgraded to 1.25GB of RAM, running Linux Mint and Stepmania 5. Background videos run horribly - they seem to run slower than they should and desync themselves from the songs, and hurt the framerate of the arrows. But! Backgrounds that use just simple animations run just fine, so I was wondering if there was an application I could use to rip each frame out of a video and save them as individual PNGs, and then sequence them to their respective songs. Automatically, of course, since setting a BG change for 30 frames a second would take forever.

I mean, has someone done this before? Would it work? Or is there some better way on going about getting BGvideos to run smoothly that I don't know about?

My personal usecase is on an MK6 with a slight CPU upgrade.

I haven't had issues with any videos, even bulky 80+MB/minute 30fps videos, except for a good number of 60fps MPEG-4 videos. My gut says it is likely just limitations of the AGP bus (official PiU software conspicuously never exceeds 30 on FMV BGAs) but I haven't spent the time profiling just yet. You may want to try doublechecking the framerates of your various videos and reencoding them to 30fps or below.

Also, video sync is known to drift if the video's framerate is very close to or above the engine framerate. Cutting the videos' framerates back should help the sync issue.

Another thing; most Linux distros ship older ffmpeg with an obscure bug that causes sync problems for SM. If you're not pulling in ffmpeg version 2.1 you may want to seek out a PPA or just build from source.

Finally, if you think decoding a video is slow, imagine what hitting the filesystem every frame to pick up a new PNG would do for your framerate...