[PD] using two computers with pd/gem

IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig at iem.at
Sat May 21 17:08:07 CEST 2005


Paris Treantafeles wrote:
> hi list,
> 
> can someone please suggest which objects i should be looking at to do 
> the following.
> 
> i would like to have one computer with a pd/gem patch that is actually 
> being executed/rendered on another machine.
> is that possible?

yes

(the suggestions here are totally different from what derek proposed, as 
you are running only one single instance of pd which is rendering the 
Gem-window to a remote machine)

the simple solution:
use linux; create the gemwindow on the remote machine with something 
like [create dali:8.0( (where "dali" is the remote-computer that should 
render the window, and "8.0" is the display on "dali" you want to render 
to); for more information search for X-forwarding.

the complicated solution:
use chromium (http://chromium.sf.net), a cross-platform distributed 
highly-scalable openGL (and so on and so on...) rendering system. runs 
on linux, w32, osX and irix (and probably some other os's...); does not 
require any changes to the openGL-application (in this case: Gem), so it 
should work out of the box.
it is quite complicated to configure (but gosh, it is really powerful); 
i have only tested it under linux and it works after some quirks (search 
the gem-dev mailing-list archives)
if you are trying to use it with some other OS, i would be thankful for 
any reports.


notes:
  X-forwarding will run the server-side of openGL on the remote machine
  chromium will run everything (in the openGL domain, of course) on the 
"render-network" (and i guess you can configure what computer is what 
node in your network)
  using chromium is really an overhead for a task as simple as 
forwarding a window
  using a lot of textures (like video, for example) will of course make 
a significant traffic on your network.




something totally different:
if you just want to run the patch on 1 computer and the rendering on the 
other computer because you want to use all of the gfx-cards outputs for 
the video and you don't want to show your patch (e.g. you want to 
interact with your dual-head fullscreen rendering) you can also (and 
this might be simpler):
- do as derek suggests: remote control your Gem patch via [netsend] or 
the like.
- use X-forwarding to run the pd-patch on the "remote"-computer, even 
though pd (and Gem) are running on the "render"-computer
- pd and pd-gui are 2 applications that interact via a 
tcp/ip-connection; this means you can run pd on one computer (the 
"render"-target) and pd-gui on another computer (your interface)





mfg.a.sdr
IOhannes




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