Video->NT->GEM??

[Mark Danks]

Michael Kieslinger wrote:
> 
> i am planning an installation where i want use the PD-GEM software to
> control, live video-input. i saw a demo last year at the ICMC with GEM
> running on SGI, where this was possible. in the installation i will 
  yes, the O2 has a video output which is just a portion of the screen. 
Very easy to deal with.

> a PC with NT. since i didn4t work with GEM before, i have following
> basic questions:
> is there a video-input object that runs on NT?

  Yes, but it has a lot of problems.  It works (sometimes) with a
QuickCam, but I haven't been able to test it with any other cameras. 
Unless I (or someone else) deals with the problems, I would not
recommend depending on pix_video on NT.

> can i use any video-capture card or do i need to use a special one?

  It depends.  GEM just puts a window up on the screen, so your capture
card will need to deal with this.  If the card is expecting to receive
actual pixels from the app, then it probably won't work (unless you
modify GEM of course, and even then, you will have problems with OpenGL
acceleration).  The easiest way to deal with this is to set your monitor
to 640x480 (or something) and just convert the video signal from VGA to
NTSC/PAL/SECAM.  Of course, the GEM window will need to be full screen,
which makes it hard to interact with Pd (unless you have another
computer communicating via netsend/receive (I have done stuff like this
before, so it does work...)

> can anybody suggest a card that doesn4t cost to much?
> 

  If you mean a graphics card, then there are a lot of options.  The
Diamond FireGL1000 is supposed to be okay.  Also, the Voodoo2 from 3DFx
just released a beta2 of their OpenGL driver.

Later, Mark

-- 
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-           Mark Danks             -
-       mdanks at xaostools.com       -
-  http://cybermed.ucsd.edu/mdanks -
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