MediaMaster 1.1 brings important modifications to our video engine and particularly how the video synchronization and multi threading decoding is processed. It has been optimized to perform what can be called “software genlock” in order to ensure the best possible fluidity on computers equipped with multi core processors. The genlocking we refer to is the action of locking the frequency of a media to a reference signal or clock (check out the related wikipedia article for a complete explanation). Let’s examine quickly the process of displaying frames. Roughly, 3 steps must be acheived:

There’s a certain point where it becomes very hard to demonstrate to a large audience what you do. As we strive towards the limits of the extreme, it becomes more and more difficult to demonstrate in a simple way the results of our work. Last couple of month, we’ve been working very intensively on the new release of MediaMaster (version 1.1 – which should be out very soon). One of our goals for this release was to improve radically our engine to be able to run a couple of movies at monitor rate with no frame drops. 60 fps that is. And we did it. This means that you will be able – of course depending on the computer and the movies you are displaying – to run movies perfectly locked to the monitor sync. The result is brilliant – even for movies at 30 fps – because your eye directly catches the smoothness of the playback.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the LED Mapper extension to map the output from ArKaos MediaMaster to a wall of 6 Schnick-Schnack C100 LED Panels. As you will see, it’s pretty self-explanatory and really easy to achieve.. There is no specific hardware necessary to convert the video signal for the LED Panels, ArKaos MediaMaster outputs the signal in ArtNet through an Ethernet cable that goes to a network switch connecting the 6 C100 panels together. The total surface is 6 sq. meters (3x2m) and 18 DMX universes are used to drive the 2400 LEDs.

When it comes to media playback, at ArKaos we always fight to get the best out of current computer configuration. When you are in the show industry and try to find out the best way to compress your content it’s still a little bit of black magic. While some codec are able to compress video very well they are heavy to handle for the machines, even more, the codec that does the best job at compressing while keeping a good quality such as H264 are very bad when you need to scratch your media. The best codec for users that need to interact a lot with the content should allow to play forward and backward easily and should allow to jump into the content quickly.