GrandVJ 1.2b1 supports Flash AS3, Quartz Composer, APC40 and more
Oct/0915
We just released a new beta version of GrandVJ, you can download it from our forums:
http://www.arkaos.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=6828
This version has many new cool things which are detailed in the forum post, here is a recap:
- New ultra smooth engine
- Support for Akai APC40 & Generic midi feedback
(also for Behringer BCR2000/BCF2000, Livid OHM, ..) - Quartz composer player (Mac OS X)
- Support for Flash Actionscript 3
- Cell layer assignment
- Mixer state saving
- Added master blackout button
- New enhanced soft-edging algorithm
- Added vertical/horizontal position presets for TripleHead2Go
- Several Bug fixes.
- New fullscreen option (PC)
We plan to ship the final version at the end of this month so we encourage you to check if this new version is working fine and to report any problems or suggestions by creating a topic in the GrandVJ forum.
Happy testing, we hope you will have as much fun using this version as we had to code it!
Why software genlock at 60 FPS does matter!
Sep/091
MediaMaster 1.1 brings important modifications to our video engine and particularly how the video synchronization and multi threading decoding is processed. It has been optimized to perform what can be called “software genlock” in order to ensure the best possible fluidity on computers equipped with multi core processors.
The genlocking we refer to is the action of locking the frequency of a media to a reference signal or clock (check out the related wikipedia article for a complete explanation).
Let’s examine quickly the process of displaying frames. Roughly, 3 steps must be acheived:
- get video frames from the disk
- upload them to the graphic card
- do the composition / blending of the layers and present them to the display
Now let’s describe how these steps are achieved without genlock and with genlock:
Showing the extreme…
Aug/091
There’s a certain point where it becomes very hard to demonstrate to a large audience what you do. As we strive towards the limits of the extreme, it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate in a simple way the results of our work.
Last couple of month, we’ve been working very intensively on the new release of MediaMaster (version 1.1 – which should be out very soon). One of our goals for this release was to improve radically our engine to be able to run a couple of movies at monitor rate with no frame drops.
60 fps that is.
And we did it.
This means that you will be able – of course depending on the computer and the movies you are displaying – to run movies perfectly locked to the monitor sync.
The result is brilliant – even for movies at 30 fps – because your eye directly catches the smoothness of the playback.
But let’s go back to the beginning of our article. How do you show that ? If we want to show you a smooth 60fps stream, every step of the chain needs to be perfect.
New video codec based on texture compression
Jul/091
When it comes to media playback, at ArKaos we always fight to get the best out of current computer configuration.
When you are in the show industry and try to find out the best way to compress your content it’s still a little bit of black magic. While some codec are able to compress video very well they are heavy to handle for the machines, even more, the codec that does the best job at compressing while keeping a good quality such as H264 are very bad when you need to scratch your media.
The best codec for users that need to interact a lot with the content should allow to play forward and backward easily and should allow to jump into the content quickly.
Recently, I’ve heard about experiments with a file format designed by graphic card manufacturers and based on texture compression DXT1 DXT3 or DXT5 and I was wondering how hard it would be to add support for such a format to QuickTime through a new codec. Being programing for the QuickTime API since it’s version 1.0 beta I was considering the challenge fun and interesting.
Using QuickTime or FFMPEG on a PC?
Jul/090
Here’s a quick tip for PC users: if you use a multi-core/multi-processor machine with GrandVJ or MediaMaster, you will benefit a lot to use codecs that are played through our FFMPEG player rather than through QuickTime.
This is due to the fact that on a PC, the internal QuickTime decoding routines are not capable of multi-threading, which makes it impossible to decode frames in parallel. So even if one layer can run properly using QuickTime libraries, the more layer you pile up, the more the decoding bottleneck will show up.
On Mac OSX, QuickTime is now mostly multi-threaded decoding so it’s not such an issue but we recommend to try to use codec supported by our FFMPEG player in any case.
Important: make sure you understand we refer to the internal QuickTime player and NOT to QuickTime files in general. Some QuickTime files (for example, files based on mpeg/mpeg2/mpeg4/PhotoJPEG/Motion JPEG/H.264 codec) are played through the FFMPEG player.
To know what internal player is used for what file, use the information shown in the visual library:
Visuals library
In this case, both movies are QuickTime files. The first one is read through QuickTime because the Cinepak Codec is not handled by FFMPEG.It will play but it is not optimal.
The second is read through FFMPEG because it’s using H.264 codec, it is therefore better for performances.
Software performance analysis
Jun/094
When your frame rate goes down, and the video starts lagging, it is important to be able to analyse where it can come from. Today we’re going to look at some information we can use to troubleshoot this.
Roughly, the way our application works is the following: at each pass, we read a video frame from the disk if needed, decode it and then send it to the GPU (the Graphic card’s CPU) together with all blending and effect operations. Then we ask the graphic card to flush all operations (that is actually processing all pending graphical instructions) and present it to the display.
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