bastardvj

Intro

A simple veejaying patch based on Puredata. Mostly everything is stolen from the puredata community. It's stable and can be used during live events without problems. I'm mostly using it with http://ethnicxplosion.net/ (electronic ethnic band).

Table of contents

• Intro
• What's needed
• Usage
• Troubleshooting
• Bugs
• Greetings
• Encoding Tips

What's needed

• Linux (used on gentoo amd64, debian and Ubuntu)
• puredata
• Bastardvj (May 2007)
• pdp : http://zwizwa.fartit.com/pd/pdp/
• pidip : http://ydegoyon.free.fr/pidip.html
• playlist, countund : http://ydegoyon.free.fr/software.html
• extra infos : puredata-vj

Usage

• untar and go inside the bastardvj directory. Run ./bastardvj.sh

#!/bin/sh
pd -lib pdp -lib pidip r1_2D-43.pd

• Configure the path to your videos and images in pd conf (a box in the middle of the patch)
• Choose a video in the left playlist-abs (it should trigger a pdp video window) and then a video in the right playlist-abs. Use the central big mixer to mix the 2 videos.
• The speed and "randomness" can also be modified.
• With Blanco and Negro buttons, black or white videos are sent to "clean" the pdp window (these 2 videos files are included into the distributions. Change the path in playlist-abs.pd).
• Effects : try yourself :)
• Webcam : open it (v4l) and mix it (I need to open camstream before my logitech webcam is seen by pdp_v4l).
• Images : *.png *.jpg can be played randomly and "blended by the sound" .
• DSP : route sound (xmms, Alsa line-in, jackd) to Puredata. You can also use jackd and qjacktl. The purple toggle will triggers with message coming from the bonk object (very simple sound computation).

Troubleshooting

• if the pdp window is not appearing try to change pdp_glx to pdp_xv (it means that your opengl stuff is not working correctly or that you don't have an opengl on your system). Bastard.vj is working smoothly on a celeron 1.4ghz (without dual head... unusable).
• look at the main pd windows to be sure that the libraries need by bastard.vj are loaded
• try to launch the patch like this : pd -noloadbang -nogui -lib pdp -lib pidip patch.p

Bugs

• Main video mixer has to be tweak to mix the 2 channels correctly when first used...

Greetings

I've discovered puredata in October 2005, Tati, Rama, Alexandre, Lluis and the puredata mailing-list have provided lots of helpful advises to bootstrap my puredata 's craziness. If you want to setup such environment is always not easy. If your are running Linux and want to compile everything, have a look to puredata-vj.

Encoding Tips

convert a file to a format readable by avidemux :
mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg file1.mpg -o file1.avi

convert this avi file to uncompressed quicktime (readable by pdp_qt) :
transcode -Z 320x240 -f 12 -y mov -F jpeg -i file1.avi -o file1.mov