Hey!

I've been looking for advice on multiple GEM windows but I haven't found any promising alternatives.

I'm using two monitors and need a GEM window in each. Is the only way around this to make a gigantic GEM window and split it between the two screens?

Regards,
J

Greetings all,

I am new to this site and I am a total hack when it comes to PD, but I manage to create some interesting music with it.

I am looking to incorporate video into my live performances.

I have learned to use the basics of GEM and I have managed to build a simple video mixer, thanks to a great tutorial online.

My question is basically a follow up to a previous question in this thread: can we have more than one GEM window running with different content in each?

I read somewhere of having multiple instances of Pure Data running at the same time. I copied my PD Extended and named one of them "PD Extended2," but when I would open my second video mixer (which I also renamed), the second video mixer would open under PD Extended - not the renamed copy.

So, here is the another question: how to you copy and run multiple versions of PD Extended in OSX? And finally, does this allow for more than one GEM window to run with different content in each?

Thank you for any help.

All best,
D

I'm not sure about how to get two instances of PD running on OSX, and you can't make more than 1 GEM window, but you might be able to make multiple SDL windows with PDP and Gridflow. There are some bridge objects to convert GEMs [pix_] objects to PDP and visa/versa.

Hi Atarikai,

wow, this is very exciting....you responded!

Again, I am really a beginner. I get things to run by accident.

That said, what is a SDL window? By PDP, I think you mean Pure Data Packet, which I think has to do with the plugins that come with Pure Data Extended. I am not really at all familiar with how to make use of those plugins.

Some step-by-step guidance, would be most helpful, if you have the patience.

D

Yeah GEM and PDP are part of PD-extended. If you look under Help->Browser you'll get access to a bunch of help files and example patches. In that browser list you'll find a /pdp folder where you can check out all the pdp objects and help files.
Check out pdp2gem-help.pd and pix_2pdp-help.pd

From what I understand, GEM only uses OpenGL for output and only 1 GDL window per PD process. PDP can use other libraries: XV (X11 output), GLX (openGL), and SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer - Linux). Now I just tried on my Ubuntu Linux box, and was able to create 2 windows with [pdp_glx]. I haven't tried sending 2 different images streams to the windows yet, but I think it'll work fine - provided your computer is up to the task of outputing to multiple GLX windows.

Gridflow is a separate library that doesn't come with PD-extended, but you can install it separately (though doesn't work very well on Windows - not without a bunch of tweaks). It's a beast to get going, but it's very powerful.

Also, if you're on OSX, try the pixelTango abstractions (part of pd-extended)...cool stuff

On OSX, you can open a second instance of Pd by ctrl-clicking on the Pd-extended icon in Finder, select Show Package Contents, navigate to Contents/MacOS/, and double-click the pd-extended icon.

You can also do it in the terminal, but I can't remember how.

Greetings atarikai and Maelstorm,

Thank you both for your guidance. I was not able to work with the PDP stuff without it locking up or crashing. I would like to get this working. The moment X11 would open, PD would crash. I was looking around at some other patches in PD and found the [pdp2gem_help] and it too would crash when I tried to open a .mov file in it. Maybe that is a format that the patch doesn't like....?

However, I was able to open another instance of PD thanks to Maelstorm's tutorial. So now I have two GEM windows open with different content in each.

Thank you so much to both of you.

D

Hi atarikai,

I have been fooling around with pixelTango and I think I am missing something.

How do you get videos to play?

I get that these abstractions make quick use of GEM. I tried putting the [pt.video] object on a new canvas, but got an error:

pool register
... couldn't create

....which I assume means that it could not create a gem window?

Do I use a layer function/object to get a video to play?

Sorry for the lamo questions.

best,
D

OK!

I got the "pool" external loaded and pixel tango working - sort of.

for some reason it will not load my .mov files in one of the example patches with two layers.

Any thoughts?

best
D

I haven't used PD on OSX in over a year, so unfortunately I can't troubleshoot here...but I would check/update your version of quicktime or the 'libquicktime' library (whatever it's called on OSX) that PD is using.

Mov files are native to OSX so it's got to be a codec setting that's causing the crashes. Got any other video software that could have changed things?

Hopefully someone else with OSX could help with this.