don't rely too much on software

[thomase]

but that's what I said in my first post: even a v4 can crash on you...
as soon as there's electronics, there's a chance for crash, period.
and if you look @ the vidvox forums there are reports of crashing dvd players while grid did not crash...
i think the thread should be renamed to "never rely on a single piece of kit"

[sleepytom]

Originally posted by alangeering

My kiss DVD player is actually running linux, albeit a small, optimised version for the microcontroller inside.

Yeah embedded linux is a very popular way to produce things cheaply - often using large amounts of opensource code.

interestingly a lot of the new edirol products (RG100 DV7 CG8 etc) are linux based - even more interestingly they are built from GPL code and thus they have to release the source code.

you can download the code from http://www.roland.com/support/gpl/

[sketchyj]

yea i think that is what i really meant .."don't rely on a single piece of kit"
also, at my last show, i was using the V4 as primarily a switching device....shit, if all i needed was a switcher i could have saved $900 and gotten one at radio shack for $40 bucks....the V4 is a powerful machine in it's own right...i guess i was mainly trying to say that it's a machine built for us VJs, and, like all roland products, it is solid and you can probably count on it working. I havent even started using the effects yet on the V4, before the next gig i'm going to definately practice more incorporating the V4 into my set. I have a roland DJ-2000 mixer, and i really love it. However, it takes time to learn the machine, but i've gotten some really great results with it, it has onboard effects. Seems like all i have time for between gigs is programming content for arkaos, but i really want to spend more time programming memory sets for the V4 and practising it at home

[sketchyj]

oh i forgot the other part of the story last night...i had programmed this .kos file for arkaos, but i never tested it first running a 2nd monitor in full mode, so when i set up at the club, everytime i would open that synth file and try to get into full screen mode , arkaos would crash. The way i worked around this potentially gig ruining nightmare was to use horizontal span as my display mode in windows rather than dual view, then i enlarged the preview window and moved it across, which meant that i had to use my external monitor as my preview window, rather than keeping one open on my laptop.....i was almost ready to start shitting my pants at the gig when arkaos crashed 5 times in a row trying to make work

[asterix]

Its impossible to get 100% accuracy with beatmatching eitherway.

If you are trying to beatmatch to the bass line - try getting yourself a cheapy audio mixer. Drop the highs right down and mid about 3/4 down. Your bass signal is alot clearer and is the only 'level' detectable by your beatmatching software

Because I usually vj to psytrance etc - and don't like hard cuts - I like to use flowmotions 8 band EQ to assign variables to. There are may rythms contained within a bar and sometimes you get a high that behaves like a beat. I use that quite often

[inopiaCGA]

You guys seem to forget a couple of things. First of all, most VJ software I've seen is rather poorly programmed. Take resolume for example. I have an athlon 1400 as my main machine, and when I run resolume on it it eats up 80% of CPU to do nothing at all (no clips running, just right after I started the program). Also, I've seen it crash on more than one occasion, once even during a gig because the machine it was running on didn't have flash installed (now there's crappy coding for ya, probably too lazy to build in a fucking check).

VJ software is usually created by amateur programmers. And what is worse, everybody is trying to make a buck off these crappy programs, so there's no code sharing and nobody is fixing the bugs because they're all out hunting for new features (it's more fun to code new features than to fix old bugs, memory leaks or bloat ... one of the reasons gnome/gtk/firefox are so bloated

If you run a company that builds $2000 dollar embedded systems (nobody in their right minds builds pure electronic synths, everything is just CPU's and DSP's nowadays, running proprietary software) you can afford to hire decent programmers and force them to write stable code. Also embedded systems don't run an OS, because the OS's main task is to interface with the hardware (all the hardware AND code is proprietary, so no reason to have an os there) and provide multitasking (only one programs runs at a time, so no need for that either. Multithreading can be done with standard libs like pthreads).

A well tuned PC with a stable OS (windows is completely stable, if well configured) is just as good as an embedded system.

I guess the core message of my rant is that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and in the case of VJ-ing the software is clearly that weak link. So instead of claiming 'hardware' is better, you should rant about how coders are spending your $100 or so on shooting up and whores instead of fixing bugs

(ps: read smilies wherever neccesairy to not get pissed at me for speaking my mind)

[signal55]

yeah i have a similar prob with arkaos after about an 2 hours of continuos use the whole thing starts to stutter and play movies at a really slow rate, is it somthing to do with the memory getting clogged up, (like a over used hoover, yeah i know that sounds stupid)

xdave

[MoRpH]

It doesn;t sound stupid its called a memory leak, its due to crap coding.

[signal55]

thanks morph i guessed so, i don't suppose someone could explain why crap coding cause's this, please, so i can stop using my hoover analogy when someone ask why the video looks stuttered. (so i can at least look half clever)

xdave

[MoRpH]

I believe it can be to do with bad garbage collection functions in code (eg. cleaning up after each frame generated, etc.)