Butt Naked Broadcasting

2006-12-05T00:54:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, it seems I've been neglecting my blog (actually, I forgot I even had it). I got a traffic report a few days ago and it seems that even after 1 1/2 years, people still come here for some reason or another. The work I've done so far on the rendering engine is too much to list here right now. It's currently being used in The Andersen Projec t and will be soon featured at the Den as a Video Bar server.

I've also decided to go with ShatterStar Composer for the name of the main IDE. I completely ditched Delphi in favor of C# for the UI (Borland just left everyone high and dry). There's no cut in speed because the rendering engine is written 100% C++, plus it's a COM object so I can use it pretty much any language I want. Long story short... screen shots!

Height Field

2005-04-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. I wasn't supposed to make anymore plugins, but I was going to have to get around to this one sooner or later.

What this does is takes a frame of video and converts it to D3DFMT_A32B32G32R32F. This is a must because PS3 vertex shaders can only do texture lookups on 32 bit floating point textures. Getting a D3DFMT_R8G8B8A8 texture to a D3DFMT_A32B32G32R32F texture is a bitch because you can't just do a stretchrect for color conversions, it has to be done via a pixel shader. The luminance of the video frame is then used to deform the mesh. Most everyone uses this for water simulations but it can do a lot more. For example, a Height Field plugin combined with a Sobel Outline plugin creates a startling version of the sketchy animation seen in Aha's 80's video "Take on Me". This screen shot, from Mathiew Bourne's Swan Lake, shows the before and after using the Aha effect. (can I call it that?)

At any rate, I started working on this plugin as a precursor to a fluid height field solver to alow for liquid like effects in Butt Naked VM. It's a good thing I did this first because there's a lot of limitations involved in vertex texture fetching, and several tricks had to be made to get it to work.

April

2005-04-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh, the weekend. And payday!

I'm putting a pause on plugin creation. (30 so far) It's easy to get carried away and neglect work on the core functions on the rendering engine. Next week I'll start work on the audio spectral analysis, oscilators (for parameter control) and the DirectShow push source filter.

For the audio spectral analysis, the user will have the option to use SSE enhanced FFT, or to let the GPU calculate the FFTs. Research has shown that GPUs currently aren't necessarily faster at DCT time decimation, but this is most likely due to AGP bandwith bottle necking. A problem not associated with PCI express.

The Push Source filter will be interesting. It will allow the output of ShatterStar to be fed directly into any FilterGraph. This will allow for streaming of video to anything Directshow supports: Video compression, file writers, network feeds, DV devices, etc. If I can manage to have it operate outside the rendering engine's address space, other applications should be able to use it as a capture source, ie feeding video directly into Vegas Video, or feeding the output back into ShatterStar as a new video source.

I'll also be working on a web page to host information about the current projects I'm working on. However, I'm not really a master at web design.

But now!!! Eye Candy!

The link goes to a page that shows the 3 sources I used to create the Eyecandy video clip. I'll have the clip online as soon as I find some space.

Demo clip

2005-03-16T23:18:00.000-08:00

I slapped this together real quick to demonstrate the layering of effects and volumetric lighting in the ShatterStar rendering engine. The video is comprised of 9 different layers, each with 1 to 5 pixel shaders. Once I design something that resembles a user interface, the current quality of clips will seem pretty silly. Any-who, this was rendered in real time with an 800 x 600 back buffer, sent to a miniDV camera, then re-encoded in Sony Vegas. The compression really steals alot of the ewww-ahhhh value, but eh... You'll get the idea. In the lower right of the video is a bubble containing the unprocessed video so you can compare the results.

Vertex Shaders

2005-03-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

I finally got vertex shaders incorporated. This opens up a whole mess of possibilities. Created a plugin based on the MrWiggle example in the nVidia SDK. It's a Sinusoidal warp effect that uses surface normals generated in the vertex shader to create a lighting effect on the waves. (eek. Say that 10 times fast)

The ice cream scene has 3 layers (4 counting the pip in the upper left) Each one with a stronger wave amplitude and higher alpha than the previous. The 2 final channels also have a circular LUT fade to keep the wave effect centered and preserve the border of the frame.

The Patric Star scene has 9 layers with a butt load of effects. Sinusoidal, LUT fade, edge detect, tinting, radial blur, and chroma key. To really appreciate it it has to be seen in motion. Hopefully I'll find some place soon to host video clips.

These clips were rendered using the Intervideo DVD decoder. The nVidia DVD decoder commits suicide if you try to use it in a developer environment. (nVidia are a bunch of PRICKS). I've had nothing but trouble working with those bastards. Anyhow, enough ranting.....

Logic Flaw

2005-03-08T18:18:00.000-08:00

Yup. Jack Daniels works like a charm. I knew the logic flaw would be something very stupid. Now I can finally move along to new parts of the rendering engine.

March Stuff

2005-03-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

Oh joy. Finally got a DV cam. I'm only 5 years late for the 21st century. Best of all, I can finally start coding for firewire in/out. There's a horrible logic flaw somewhere in the my cloning functions. I've been trying to weed it out for 2 weeks, but eh, it's the weekend. I'm going to go get drunk. That always seems to help find obvious problems in my code. Or create them :)

And Now! Zim all 3D and stuff:

Radiate

2005-02-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

Re-wrote the renderchaineffects method. Much cleaner and faster now. Uses one less texture per effect chain ( it used to use 3). I'll work on cloning this weekend. Once that becomes more stable I'll finally start putting together Butt Naked VM. Here's another screen shot:

This was accomplished by taking the live input and cloning it into 2 layers. The top layer has a Edge Detection filter linked to a Radial Blur filter. (the Pope should have one of these)

Feb update

2005-02-15T19:53:00.000-08:00

Still doing alot of fine tuning on the plugin architecture. I'm going to re-write the ::RenderChainEffects method to allow for cleaner access to cloned sources. With the addition of cloning, the compositing capabilites are phenominal:

This was made with 5 Directshow sources composited together using the alpha output of the LUT Fade plugin and the Toning Plugin.

update

2005-01-31T22:22:00.000-08:00

I've finally gotten the plugin architecture working (not finished). What a wonderfull sense of joy :) Working on the rendering engine seems more like fun now than, well, work. Jason Dorie (of MIDVID fame) and I worked on the Chromakey algorithm. He showed me how to optimize the hell out of it. It actually works quite well on the old 5200FX. Looking at the web tracker, it seems several people out there are having trouble finding information on chromakeying algorithms. Look here! High Quality Chroma Key by Michael Ashihkmin. It's fast and simple to implement. If you are looking to implement it in HLSL e-mail me.

Buttnaked VM

2005-01-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

Okey doke. It's been it a while, but here's the latest news:

The nVidia 6600gt exceeds all my expectations. It chews through the simple chroma key algorithm (remember, the simple chroma key shader processes YUV, not RGB) in real time at 720p resoltion. There's enough GPU time left over to allow for additional processing (spill correction, mask smoothing, edge detection, etc). As soon as nVidia and/or Microsoft get off thier lazy asses and release the DLLs that enable wmv9 acceleration, I'll see how well it handles 1080p HD formats.

I've discovered why so few people use GDI+ to create user interfaces. It's slow as molassess. Painfully slow. The graphics card has to be GDI+ accellerated, which I think only Matrox is. It's odd to see major players like ATI and nVidia snub a micrsoft standard. Microsoft has released a beta for thier upcomming Avalon subsystem, but I'm not going to touch that for now. To expidite things, my first release (ButtNaked VM) will use Jedi's JVCL and custom controls derived from TGraphicControl and regular old GDI.

Having absolutely no MIDI programming background, I thought implementing MIDI control into Butt Naked applications was going to be a daunting task. Also, having no MIDI equipment seemed to be a problem. Here was a simple solution:

LoopBe1. An internal midi loopback driver.
The Virtual MIDI Keyboard. Self explanitory.

Since the MIDI specifiaction is so simple, implementing it into Delphi's VCL took all but 10 minutes.

At some point in time I'll make one of these: Midi Box. I have no doubt in my mind that it is the basis of Livid Instrument's Tactic Video Mixing Instrument.

Aside from the techno-lust value of creating a custom midi based mixer, having access to the microcontroller code should alow me to output additional midi codes per continuous controller. It seems logical that an additional sysex midi code will allow for greater than 7 bit resolution while maintaing backwards compatability. This is such a no-brainer, I doubt no one's thought of this yet.

I've decided to drop the internal compiler for the plug-in architecture for now. All the free compilers fall under the GPL license, and it would be too messy to deal with. The plug in architecure now uses an internal Object that manages c-style exported call back functions in a dll. (OnInitialize, OnInstantiate, OnCompose, etc)

Sheesh

2004-12-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

Phew! Was getting kind of worried there. Hit a few snags getting the devolpment environment back up, but it's all good now.

2004-12-21T13:24:00.000-08:00

For some reason, my copy of win XP decided it's not activated anymore. Seems like people who pirate it have less problems than I do. Oh well. A clean install was needed anyway. Haven't lost anything, so that's good. I just ordered an nVidia 6600Gt. The video processor on it has my technolust man-gina all wet. The nVidia 5200fx simply wasn't giving me the results with the shader based chromkeying and chromaplasting in ShatterStar. There's literaly a fan attached to it with bandaids and bubble gum so that I could overclock it.

It'll take me a while to get my development environment back to the way it was, but once it is I'll continue work on the user interface. I've combined borland's VCL with GDI+ to come up with a totally anti-aliased and scalable user interface. I'll post some screen shots of the work in progress when I get off my lazy ass.

update

2004-12-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've been tediously diagramming the structure of the scripting system. I don't want to get half way through it and realize I've coded myself into a corner. As much as I would have loved to stick with xblite, it's lack of decent pointers has pretty much ruled it out. Free Pascal works very well, and will be the first to be coded into the CXScript class. (actually, it already has). I'll do minGW after that to appease the c++ coders out there :) I've figured out the chaining of shader effects, however the speed is not what I was looking for. I'm going to consult the shader gurus to find the best way to do render targets.

Pirate TV

2004-11-24T14:13:00.000-08:00

Johnny gets devilish idea

CXScript

2004-11-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Created the CXScript object. It loads, compiles and dynamically links the functions into CXScript. Static data in the dll is contained in a structure. When a new copy of a CXScript object is created, a set function (Initialize()) in the dll is called, returning a pointer to the structure. This allows for multiple copies of scripts to use one DLL and still maintain unique data. The dll will however be responsible for it's own memory management (creation and destruction of each allocated static structure and it's members).

It's strange that even though I didn't want to use class factories (I didn't fully understand them), it's slowly becoming just that. At least this way the type of language used for the script is transparent to the CXScript object as long as it sticks to C-style function calls. Looks like Freepascal fits into the CXScript quite well. There's still a bit fine tuning, and compilation error parsing to do. The end result will be native code plugins for the rendering engine that are easy for the end user to create ir modify. Oh what joy!

Still here

2004-11-22T10:39:00.000-08:00

I'm still here. Been working on the xblite based scripting system. Using dynamically (sp?) compiled dll's seems like such a no-brainer for applications. The performance gain over a virtual machine scripting language is HUGE! If this works as well as I hope, I'll add support for FreePascal and MinGW allowing scripts to be made in the language of one's own prefference. The FreePascal team, although painfull to look at, are working on an x86-64 bit version of the compiler. (joy!) It's safe to assume there will not be a 64bit version of xblite or MinGW anytime soon (if ever). I'll also be moving the SubGraph object into the VMR9Wizard to greatly ease the implementation of ShatterStar into languages other than Delphi (C# perhaps?). Okey dokey, back to work.

ShatterStar update

2004-11-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Been working on several things at once, which is not a good thing for me. I tend to get sidetracked very easily. Anyhow, DVD decoders SUCK! How in Christ's name do they expect you to develope dvd apps if dvd decoders refuse to operate with a debugger present!?!? Well, we'll just have to come back to that one at a later time. I'm half way through designing a happy home for fx shaders to live inside the rendering core. I call it CEffect. (original yes?) It uses the STL list container to manage the parameters much the same way the compositor manages frames. Okeydoke, back to work.

Weeeeeee!

2004-11-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

Added ClearScreen(bool cs)
turns off/on back buffer clearing in the render engine. Who'da thought alpha channels could be so fun?

I've been dwelling on how I'm going to be able to implement OIT (order independent transparency). I'm not going to touch the rendering core until I can find a reasonable fast way to achieve this. I'm currently forcasting at least an nVidia 5700fx/ATI 9600 class gpu to fully achieve all the desired FX for ShatterStar.

I wish I could recall where I found this little ninja guy too. His art is quite remarkable. If you recognize it, drop me a note.

Shader Optimizing

2004-10-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

It seems using the half floats instead of full floats in HLSL gives an incredible performance boost. It helps to read the instruction manuals every now and then.

Also, expect to see some components from Jan's Freeware Collection used in Butt Naked products. His "XML as a database engine" dohickey will be nifty to play with.

Chroma Keying

2004-10-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

If you're in highschool, and wondering what use you'd ever have for trigonometry. This is it:

This is a fairly simple chromakey mask technique that will be suitable for shatterstar's compositing.



float4 ChromaKey( vertexOutput IN): COLOR

{

	float X, Z;

  	float4 chromaTexture = tex2D( TextureSampler, IN.texCoordDiffuse );

	IN.diffAmbColor = chromaTexture;

	

	//convert texture to YCbCr color space

	chromaTexture.rgb = RGBtoYCbCr(chromaTexture.rgb);

	

	//Normalize Cb Cr values 

 	chromaTexture[1] = (chromaTexture[1] - 0.5) * 2;

 	chromaTexture[2] = (chromaTexture[2] - 0.5) * 2;

 	

 	//Compute X and Z

 	X = (chromaTexture[1] * cos(KeyAngle)) + (chromaTexture[2] * sin(KeyAngle));

  	Z = (chromaTexture[2] * cos(KeyAngle)) - (chromaTexture[1] * sin(KeyAngle)); 

  	

  	//calculate key mask

  	IN.diffAmbColor.a = X - (abs(Z)/(tan(AcceptanceSize/2))) ; 

  	if (X < (abs(Z)/(tan(AcceptanceSize/2)))) IN.diffAmbColor.a = 0;



	//calculate the other thingies

	if (IN.diffAmbColor.a >= MaskLimit)  IN.diffAmbColor.a = 1;

  	if (chromaTexture.r <= YLimit) IN.diffAmbColor.a = 1;

  	return IN.diffAmbColor;

}

The bad part is that it REALLY taxes my little 5200fx. It's now officially time to upgrade. Much more needs to go into the chromakeying before it's actually usefull.

Weave Wipe

2004-10-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Using this png:

with the TransitionLUT shader, we get:

(click image for more detail)

One video source is a Dance Mix DVD the other is a divx avi encoded at 640 x 400. (The Venture Brothers)

new stuff!

2004-10-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

New things added to the rendering engine:

Matrix Transformations!!! now you can spin, zoom, and stretch your video in 3D to your heart's content. (trust me, it never gets old)

The Transition LUT shader works. Actually, it worked really well. Shatter Star is already more versatile and effective than many commercial hardware video mixers I've seen.



float4 PS_Textured( vertexOutput IN): COLOR

{

  float4 diffuseTexture = tex2D( TextureSampler, IN.texCoordDiffuse );

  float4 maskTexture = tex2D (MaskSampler, IN.texCoordDiffuse );

  lutCoord.x = clamp((maskTexture.r * 0.4) + (.6 * ttime),0.1,0.9);

  float4 lutTexture = tex2D( LutSampler, lutCoord); 

  IN.diffAmbColor.rgb = diffuseTexture.rgb;

  

  IN.diffAmbColor.a = (IN.diffAmbColor.a + lutTexture.r) - 1;

  //IN.diffAmbColor.a = lutTexture.r;

  return IN.diffAmbColor;

}

The LUT:

This is different than ATI's example because they attempt to blend 2 textures on one polygon, where as this one uses the alpha channel to make a lower z ordered frame to show through. Using a LUT (look up table) basically allows any bitmap with smooth gradiations to be used as a wipe effect.

Anyhow, I'm off... I'll have the last set of Video Thingy binaries up next week. It's become too large and tacky. I'll make small individual examples to test functionality from now on.

update

2004-10-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I've decided to sort of scrap the scripting thing in favor of just embedding a compiler into the engine. A gentleman on Codeproject came up with something he calls Gecko. It's simply an interface to the mingw compiler. Short, sweet, and fast. However, not wanting end-users to learn c or c++, I've decided to embed XBlite, a small and fast subset of the Xbasic compiler. Individual "scripts" will be compiled, and dynamically linked at runtime. Also, added a scale factor to the alpha mask so masks can be used as a wipe effect. Stumbled on that in a paper published on Ati's developer site. Feel kinda foolish for overlooking that in the first place.

video thingy update

2004-10-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Fixed a few bugs (hmmmm, maybe oversites) and added a few more thingies:

Looping of clips is now enabled

If shatterstar fails to initialize, you don't get a billion little error windows. It was a bit unnerving.

You can now set the start and end points of an event. BNTV and BNVJ revolve around the concept of events, not files. One media file can be used to provide many individual events. Kinda like real-time, non-destructive editing.

Altered the swap chain so video frames can be used as rendertargets. This will allow for chained shader effects on indiviual video streams BEFORE they are rendered to the backbuffer.

Anyhow, I'm looking for the perfect scripting engine to use. Small looks nice, but I don't think it allows for structures. Lua's nice, but it's such an alien syntax, and the script engine is for end users also. Looking for something with a c style syntax.

A clever young man by the name of djMidnight on VJForums asked about quickly triggering media through directshow. I squeezed a few ugly lines of code into videothingy to see for myself, and it was instant. But like I said in the thread, you have to really want it. The reason I could get it to execute quickly was :

prerolling the video and setting it to a pause state

telling shatterstar to not render the frame bearing geometry until I told it to.

This amounts to alot of programming overhead (and smoke and mirrors). However the benefits are countless. Some the benefits are access to hardware acceleration, the deinterlacing properties of VMR9, and abstraction of all media types (videothingy treats a live video feed the same way as say, a mastroka container with mpeg4 streams. It seems using VMR9 with a custom allocator/presentor is the only scenerio where you can achieve this speed in triggering using Directshow. One drawback is seeking to the begining of a clip is not as quick as if using VFW. (that's actually an understatement) However the asynchronous nature of DirectShow and the server/client relationship of shatterstar may yet prove to be a pain in the ass, as it continues to grow.

The Venture Brothers

2004-10-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, this show is just too fucking funny. It airs on Cartoon Network's adult swim. This is the first erection I've seen on any tv show, much less an animated one.

Little Johnny Foo Foo

2004-10-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Compatible Video Cards

2004-10-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start a list of what GPUs do, and don't work with VideoThingy.
Please add comments stating which GPU's (and computer specs) you have or haven't reported success with

works
-------
ATI 7500*
ATI 8500
nVidia 5200FX

no worky
--------
ATI 7000
S3 ProSavage DDR

*no shader support

Chroma Keying

2004-10-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

It seems chroma keying is some sort of black art. Finding information on algorithms is proving a bit of a chellenge. "Video Demystified" has a very good section on it, but it's not written from a programmatic viewpoint. However, from what I can gather, the 16 bit floating points used in HLSL are very well suited to this type of matting.

New binaries

2004-09-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, no source code yet. I got sidetracked with the AlphaMasking shader. Good news is: It works!

This is Sweat Dreams by M Manson, Elen Degeneres, Invader Zim: The Girl Who Cried gnome, and some random porn movie.

Ferry Corsten's Rock Your Body Rock showing a few different Alpha Masks.

You can grab the newest binaries here: VideoThingy Binaries September Mix

Read the readme file. Again, VideoThingy is not intended to be a full application, it's just a scratchpad for the ShatterStar rendering engine. It's still hell'a fun to twiddle with though. The AlphaMask shader requires a DX9 compatable card :(

Alpha Mask Shader

2004-09-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Wow. That wasn't that hard at all. Me likey shaders :)

now I need to get the CG libraries to work inside the render engine.
(edit: FX composer outputs directly to Microsoft's HLSL)
If you don't have FX Composer from nVidia, you can get it at developer.nVidia.com

Video Thingy in Action

2004-09-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

VideoThingy mixing 5 Invader Zim movies and 3 Marylin Manson Videos (mpeg2). Each one independently controllable (Pause, Play, Seek, Tempo, Volume, Alpha mix, Z-Order), with no loss of sync or frames. Complex AVI bound codecs (ie divx, ac3) tend to lose sync after adding 5 or more video streams, but this is only on the debug binaries)

This is on an Athlon 2600 xp with nVidia fx5200 (what a horrible gpu, never buy on of these)
I've added the structure to the COM object for alpha masking, I'm still working on the shader for it though.

Lil' things

2004-09-28T22:43:00.000-07:00

Oh, my head hurts. It's strange how seemingly easy tasks turn out to be the most problematic when designing software.

Source Code

2004-09-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

Well, when I get back home this week, I'll clean up the source for TSubfilter (it's rife with memory leaks) and publish it here to be scrutinized. Gotta go cow tipping!



Things to do:

Look over ATI's video shader demo.  I doub't I'll like it much.

See if t2k picks me up for beta testing of Salvation:

http://www.treyharrison.com/salvation

Doh!

2004-09-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

After 2 weeks of pondering why the rendering engine crawls to a halt when put in exclusive full screen mode, it dawned on me that any other filters in the graph that also need a D3D device are gonna get stuck with software rendering. Not so much a bug, but a bit of an oversight on Micrsofts part. Anybody have any ideas how to get around this?

Fuzzy cowboy butt

2004-09-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Binaries

2004-09-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Nope, that didn't work. You can pick up the latest build here
https://home.comcast.net/~rsinsley/vt.rar

Video Thingy Binaries

2004-09-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

Well, let's see if Yahoo's birefcase works for hotlinks

God damn, who writes this shit? Anyhow, run release.bat to register the COM objects and send feedback when (not if) it breaks your computer. If you get a little black screen, you're a winner. If not, go get a better graphics card. It's hard coded right now to use hardware vertex processing and D3DPRESENT_INTERVAL_ONE in windowed mode. It's odd what graphic chip sets do, and do not support this, so your guess is as good as mine right now.

VideoThingy is nothing more than a scratch pad to test functionality of Shatterstar. If it it doesn't work, oh well.

Fight the power! Kill Straighty!

mega blah blah blah

2004-09-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

Okey-doke. Got the blog template mostly under control. I may have some web space to put screen shots and XML code for the blog.

BNTV?

2004-09-20T17:17:00.000-07:00

Ok someone asked me what the hell Butt Naked TV is. BNTV is a project I've been working off and on now for about 2 years now. The Shatterstar rendering engine is a com object based on Microsoft's VMR9 wizard example in the DirectX9 SDK. Everyone and thier dog seems to think the VMR9 is horribly flawed (which it is not). It's just horribly documented. What many people think are non-negotiable bugs seem to be nothing more than misinterpretations of the implementation of VMR9. Once you get past the ugliness of the COM object model it's very simple.
Any-who... the Shatterstar rendering engine is comprised of:

VMR9
Event based LUA scripting
FreeFrame
Nvidia CG shader language
and most likely a modified version of GameSWF that will use DX9

I'm gonna stick with Visual Studio 2003 for the development of Shatterstar, but examples of implementation of SS will be in Delphi 7 as will full applications ( BNTV, BNVJ, BN Broadcaster). Delphi's handling of COM make's it very simple and clean to code DirectShow applications. If you're new to this go to http://www.progdigy.com. The DSPack project is a very good starting point directshow programming in Delphi, even though BN applications will not most likely not use any source from it. The forums on Progdigy are very informative, and seldome revolve around DSPack proper.

Still working on the specifactions however. One of the big problems I still have to overcome is just where in the hell I'm gonna stick LUA. If it resides solely in the shatterstar com object, it will exclude a great deal of flexability. If it resides both in the COM server and client, it's just way too complex (ehem, sloppy). If it resides solely in the COM client, there's a big performance hit due to object locking.

Oh well, leave some comments and or questions. Still have to figure out this blog XML thingy.

gameswf

2004-09-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

yup. looks like this gameswf is the SWF render of choice. It has an OpenGL renderer, but it will be far easier to port that to DX9 than any of the other options.

http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html

AA seems to be the only thing lacking in his GL renderer, but that shouldn't be much of a prob.

.

2004-09-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... looks like the Anti-Grain Geometry might be of great interest. I don't like the thought of re-implimenting the entire flash player sdk just to be able to use alpha blending with the video.
http://www.antigrain.com/news/index.html

Or there is gameswf

update

2004-09-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Added GetVisible and SetVisible to the rendering engine. Turns on/off rendering the default frame geometry in the rendering loop.

Added code snippet from Gabest that fixes the dreadfull tearing effect in VMR9. Who'd of thunk it'd be that easy?

Gotta go run around neked at the pool party :)

test

2004-09-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

1st blog. testing testing one, two three