[PD] GEM Motion Capture

Nicolas Lhommet nlhommet at gmail.com
Fri Mar 13 02:31:57 CET 2015


Hi,
Despite the many selfish and pretentious morons who should be ban from
teaching, and their usual shameless and disgusting whining (long version :
"me me me, i'm important, my students, my university, my situation,  i'm an
artist, i only speak for myself, i'm an expert, i'm pertinent, i'm the
prophet chosen to illuminate the mind of masses,contracted (by other
morons) to teach what i want to teach, and you do understand that i'm
called to a higher mission than taking the burden of the meanest tasks, SO
OBEY AND DO YOUR F*CKING DIRTY JOB ! NOW HURRY UP AND FOLLOW THE PACE OF
CUPERTINO'S ARMIES, YOU MISERABLE SLAVES, so i can continue to enjoy the
undeserved praise for free and get more education money to forward to a
multi-billionaire manufacturer in exchange of a shinny macbook. And rejoice
that one day perhaps i may leave you a tip !"....
yeah no intention to flame. apologies if taken that way ;)

Let me bring my very own perspective to this debate (it's my turn for the
"me me" moment) : last days, i spent some time to find a simple workaround
for this very issue with webcams. I don't have a mac, but i only tried to
find a reasoned solution to this problem (like most people do on the list)
for the sake of the community of this great FREE software (thanks for all
this generous work) after someone asked about it on the french forum
codelab.fr (sadly the same person didn't provide any help in testing the
proposed fixes... guess what : another university teacher!). Eventually i
had to join some weekly "hacking" free meeting in my city today to find
Fabrice Jorge, who i didn't know but was kind enough to let me try
different software on his (2013?) Macbook Air with system 10.9.5, including
Pd-extended 0.43.4 which (fortunately!) was affected :)

Anyway, back to the subject and an actual workaround of 'error -9405' :
idea was to use a "webcam enhancer" (typically used to "decorate" video
chat) as a "passtrough", hoping it would present a virtual interface that
could be properly handled by [pix_video], while taking care of the
compatibilty with recent integrated webcam drivers (which is especially
expected from software you PAY for).

Manycam, the most popular utility of this kind, was not tested because logo
watermark can't be remove in free version anymore, and the price of a
licence is ridiculously high.
CamTwist which is a freeware (therefore an obvious choice) is not
maintained for some time, and virtual webcam never appeared in video input
settings of any application... same thing with the latest beta. The latter
is supposed to bring Yosemite support, and this failure could have been
specific to the test system, so it could worth a try.

iGlasses, a 20$ shareware available as a 7 days trial demo (and one of the
few still actively maintained applications of this type) was our last try,
and... bingo ! : detected and working with Pd-extended and [pix_video] !
Now, this has not been extensively tested at all, your mileage may vary
with any of these options and, as a workaround requiring additionnal
(commercial) software, this is far from ideal, and may present many caveats
(stability, resolution, framerate...). But i hope it could prove useful as
a temporary solution for nice people like Joshua, and unfortunate students
too :) so more thorough tests and reports are welcome.
Cheers
Nicolas


2015-03-12 17:59 GMT+01:00 me.grimm <megrimm at gmail.com>:

> >> Anyway, I may have scared up some funding to support me for a week to
> do this in the summer. I'll chime back in when I know more details
>
> yeah no intention to flame. apologies if taken that way.
>
> no i just teach what i want to teach. thats what im contracted to do which
> is dependent on my own expertise as an artist. there is no specific
> requirement at all here other than Mac/OSX/Adobe CC ... the rest is all
> instructor based but then again I only speak for myself.
>
> if i can find more funding (which i might have) ill send it your way!
>
> m
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 12:35 PM, Dan Wilcox <danomatika at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To be fair, people work on what is important to them, so no need to
>> flame. I'd suggest that a university program that *requires* PD should at
>> least be willing to fund/support it's development instead of using it as a
>> cheap alternative to Max and then *hoping* that "open source" will do that
>> for them.
>>
>> Anyway, I may have scared up some funding to support me for a week to do
>> this in the summer. I'll chime back in when I know more details
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 12:23 PM, me.grimm <megrimm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> >> disclaimer: i love linux and probably are not un-biased.
>>>
>>> Agreed!
>>>
>>> But unfortunately, here, students of Transmedia (Syracuse U) are
>>> required to buy a Mac freshmen year and are taught on osx systems/programs
>>> throughout their 4 undergraduate years. we (pd community) keeps loosing
>>> them to max/msp/jitter people/teachers here which is tragic in my opinion
>>> and gets me quite heated....
>>>
>>> It is pertinent to note I have 60+ art/design/media students this
>>> semester all being introduced to Pd in some capacity and when it starts
>>> crashing and they lose their work they get quite turned off, not just with
>>> Pd but with programming as a artist/art student in general.....
>>>
>>> I am sure the knowledge here in this community and on this list can pull
>>> together and help rectify the situation....
>>>
>>> johannes, dan, antoine and others have done awesome with Gem .... its
>>> really an amazing lib and if i could take a semester off and learn how to
>>> code better I would! maybe there are students interested in helping out?
>>> others that want to learn coding on OSX?
>>>
>>> my 2 cents on pd's osx future:
>>>
>>> fuck pd-extended (hans is dead god rest his pd soul)
>>> fuck pd-l20rk (is there any chance of an OSX 64 bit build with native
>>> Gem plugs? prob not....)
>>>
>>> CORE PD + GEM .... that is all that is necessary at the moment. Almost
>>> everything else can be abstractions....
>>>
>>>
>>> it seems like a lot of time is wasted on bullshit curved elbowed cables
>>> and the like....
>>>
>>>
>>> m
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Dan Wilcox <danomatika at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> From: "IOhannes m zmölnig" <zmoelnig at iem.at>
>>>>> To: pd-list at lists.iem.at
>>>>> Cc:
>>>>> Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:19:23 +0100
>>>>> Subject: Re: [PD] GEM Motion Capture
>>>>> On 03/11/2015 08:45 PM, Joshua Curley wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> > I also am using the latest updated from Apple: Yosemite
>>>>>
>>>>> most likely this is the problem.
>>>>> Gem still uses QuickTime for accessing the video devices on OSX, and
>>>>> afaik, yosemite has finally abandoned QT even on i386.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 32 bit is pretty much done on OS X anyway.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> so i think there are a number of possibilities:
>>>>>
>>>>> - downgrade to some older version of OSX
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> No that easy, unless you have an older backup.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> - convince (bribe, intimidate,...) someone with OSX knowledge and
>>>>> reasonable ObjC/C++ knowledge to write an AVFoundation plugin for Gem
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> - upgrade to an operating system that does not deprecate another core
>>>>> component of their OS whenever they make a new release¹.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Quicktime has been deprecated since 10.7. We had plenty of warning.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> ¹ disclaimer: i love linux and probably are not un-biased.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes :D
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Dan Wilcox
>>>> @danomatika
>>>> danomatika.com
>>>> robotcowboy.com
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Pd-list at lists.iem.at mailing list
>>>> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
>>>> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ____________________
>>> m.e.grimm, m.f.a, ed.m.
>>> syracuse u., tc3
>>> megrimm.net
>>> ____________________
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dan Wilcox
>> @danomatika
>> danomatika.com
>> robotcowboy.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> ____________________
> m.e.grimm, m.f.a, ed.m.
> syracuse u., tc3
> megrimm.net
> ____________________
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pd-list at lists.iem.at mailing list
> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
>
>
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