Ubuntu Studio 18.04 includes a package for "GEM: ver: 0.93.3 / GEM: compiled on 2018/02/01 at 21:58:19 UTC."

Current Gem is 0.94.

How do I update Gem on my system?

Deken's most recent Gem for Linux is from 2015 (seriously).

I searched for a PPA but I can't find one for this.

https://packages.debian.org/buster/gem -- compatible with Ubuntu or not?

(The immediate motivation is that, in the last 15 minutes or so, multiple Gem help patches caused Pure Data to crash. I suspect a conflict between new Pd 0.50 and old Gem 0.93...?)

hjh

@ddw_music I compiled it from the Github page: https://github.com/umlaeute/Gem
It is quite easy:

INSTALLATION:

To build & install GEM run:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

note: when using a git-clone of the Gem sources, you first need to run
./autogen.sh (which is a wrapper around autoreconf -fiv).

note: that you might want to help Gem to find the Pd-headers, e.g. by doing
$ ./configure --with-pd=/usr/include/pd
try
$ ./configure --help to see more options

@Jona

Nice, thanks for the tips!

I'm now at:

GEM: Graphics Environment for Multimedia
GEM: ver: 0.94.git 8508981
GEM: compiled  on Nov 22 2019

No time right now to check if it improved the crashes, but this was fairly painless. Thanks.

hjh

Oh, spoke too soon... where do I get the [pix_video] backends?

[pix_video]: backend #0='dc1394'    : dc1394 iidc 
[gemglxwindow]: Direct Rendering enabled!
[pix_video]: no valid video backend found

hjh

@ddw_music Pretty sure they are here...... https://github.com/umlaeute/Gem/tree/master/plugins
It is usually recommended to put only those you need in the Gem folder.
David.

@whale-av "Pretty sure they are here...... https://github.com/umlaeute/Gem/tree/master/plugins"

I'm not quite understanding something.

I find ./Gem/plugins/videoDC1394/.

Curiously, make install already installed /usr/local/lib/pd/extra/Gem/gem_videoDC1394.so.

Pd startup says "GEM: video capture plugins: dc1394" and, when loading a patch with a [pix_video], "[pix_video]: backend #0='dc1394' : dc1394 iidc."

But 'enumerate' says "[pix_video]: no devices found" -- which problem I certainly did not have in the older version.

So I suppose I need a different video plug-in? How do I determine which one?

And, to install that plug-in, which file to copy? Is it the '.so'? Readme is vague on this point.

hjh

@ddw_music Sorry. Unsure. Not using Linux for Gem and currently reading up on video backends (which used to be called plugins).
Ye olde Gem used the QT, SGI and JPEG plugins in windows if I remember correctly.

But you might need some libraries installed too....... README.linux ..... ?
The readme is from an older attempt at 0.94, but there is a bit about libraries for some video formats.
David.

@whale-av "But you might need some libraries installed too....... README.linux ..... ?
The readme is from an older attempt at 0.94, but there is a bit about libraries for some video formats."

Aha... I did find, then, that pix_film also failed to load mp4 files. That was resolved by the following:

aptitude install libgl-dev libglu-dev
aptitude install libxxf86vm-dev
aptitude install ftgl-dev
aptitude install libtiff3g-dev libjpeg62-dev libmagick++9-dev
aptitude install libmpeg3-dev libavifile-0.7-dev libquicktime-dev libdv4-dev

Then make clean, ./autogen.sh, ./configure, make.

But that didn't fix the pix_video problem.

At this point I'll take it to the Gem bug tracker. I follow the given build instructions and at least one feature is missing, which is at least a documentation bug.

hjh

For posterity:

• pix_film requires libmpeg3-dev libavifile-0.7-dev libquicktime-dev libdv4-dev packages
• pix_video requires libv4l-dev

Should be in readme, but isn't.

hjh