Michael Kieslinger wrote:

i am planning an installation where i want use the PD-GEM software to control, live video-input. i saw a demo last year at the ICMC with GEM running on SGI, where this was possible. in the installation i will

yes, the O2 has a video output which is just a portion of the screen. Very easy to deal with.

a PC with NT. since i didn4t work with GEM before, i have following basic questions: is there a video-input object that runs on NT?

Yes, but it has a lot of problems. It works (sometimes) with a QuickCam, but I haven't been able to test it with any other cameras. Unless I (or someone else) deals with the problems, I would not recommend depending on pix_video on NT.

can i use any video-capture card or do i need to use a special one?

It depends. GEM just puts a window up on the screen, so your capture card will need to deal with this. If the card is expecting to receive actual pixels from the app, then it probably won't work (unless you modify GEM of course, and even then, you will have problems with OpenGL acceleration). The easiest way to deal with this is to set your monitor to 640x480 (or something) and just convert the video signal from VGA to NTSC/PAL/SECAM. Of course, the GEM window will need to be full screen, which makes it hard to interact with Pd (unless you have another computer communicating via netsend/receive (I have done stuff like this before, so it does work...)

can anybody suggest a card that doesn4t cost to much?

If you mean a graphics card, then there are a lot of options. The Diamond FireGL1000 is supposed to be okay. Also, the Voodoo2 from 3DFx just released a beta2 of their OpenGL driver.

Later, Mark