PD Video Player with Sound

I had the idea to build a kind of solid state video player using Linux and Puredata with an Arduino. The educated reader might ask “Why PD?” and, of course, is right. The simple answer is: Because I can and its easy.

I take the latter back. When I came up with this I had totally ignored, that Puredata/Gems Pix_Film object doesn’t play sound. This means, video and sound have to be played in separate players and then be synced. Some research in PDs list gave me an example I started working with and I was partially successful. Video and sound sync well with a [vline~] but with high resolutions the sound glitches. This can be reduced by trying different video codecs (motionjpg is supposed to work pretty well) but still I wasn’t able to play 1280×1024 videos without the sound dropping sometimes. I didn’t have this problem using the [pix_buffer] object, but this way the video is loaded into the RAM uncompressed, which takes up tons of space and limits the possible length of videos loaded/used. This was on my MacBook with 2x2GHz and an onboard Intel 9400m graphics card. I will try it on Linux in the next days, lets see, if it works better.

However, I expect no wonders and theres no sense in building a solid state video player that needs hardware this expensive (and energy intensive). I want to use one of these fit-pcs, loving their small design and power consumption. For them to work with videos of that resolution I need to use their hardware acceleration, which might prove difficult on Linux (I heard nothing good about the support of intels gma500) and even worse when relying on PD/Gem, which uses OpenGL to render video. So the plan now is to use a common video player like VLC or mplayer and remote control it via network/localhost. That should take care of the hardware acceleration and still make use of the serial interface and interaction possibilities of PD. Stay tuned…

Pure Data Video Player with Audio Sync

This patch syncs video and audio

 

 

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