The evolution of MediaMaster
May/101
Here is a video showing MediaMaster 2.0 in Express version, it’s the developer’s beta that was demonstrated at the Prolight+Sound in Frankfurt last month but it will give you a good idea of what it will look like.
We were triggering video loops with an LSC DMX desk and with a small Korg Nano MIDI controller.
ArKaos MediaMaster may be the latest baby in the ArKaos video software family but it carries in its DNA all the best features of its ancestors’ different evolutions. These evolutions have always been triggered by users requests, by the different experimentations we made and by the goals we wanted to reach in terms of performance..
Kling-Net: makes LED devices Plug’n Play
Mar/104
At ArKaos, it’s now many years we’re developing software that drives LEDs in a way or another: our media server software MediaMaster and our VJ software GrandVJ are used every day to drive LED fixtures or LED walls, and of course we have the LED Mapper extension which, combined with MediaMaster, creates a very easy solution to map visuals on complex setups of DMX driven LED walls.
However there is still something that makes it too complicated and / or too expensive for anyone to display visuals on LED devices: setup…
GrandVJ and Alioscopy 3D screen integration
Mar/102
3D is spectacular, eye catching and can amaze your audience.. But unfortunately it was not really accessible to live VJing.. until now!
Recently we’ve been in contact with Alioscopy, a French company that develops auto-stereoscopic 3D displays that can produce a sensation of depth without needing cumbersome eyewear and they asked us if we could bring live VJing to their 3D screens.
The problem is, even if you are only mixing footage that is compatible with 3D projection you are still missing live visualizers which are, most of the time, a very important part of the mix and which obviously can’t be pre-encoded for 3D projection..
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!
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.
New sync experiments at WWDC
Jun/091
Fraktus used the opportunity of having the compatibility lab at WWDC to put his synced visual network player at test with Snow Leopard and 6 computers (1 server, 5 clients). The clients are some low end Macs, Mac Mini, iMacs and a MacBook Pro.
Here is the result:
Visuals synced over a network of players
May/094
Here’s the latest idea from Fraktus (our Code Guru); a way to distribute visual content over a network of players. Note that it’s just a prototype and will not necessarily become a software feature or product.
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