The new MPMP 1.7 release has now a second backend for Windows based on libVLC.

After a lot of headache what kind of solution i should use for  Windows 7 compability i decided to use the libVLC as it supports a lot of more codecs then Media Foundation. (And Microsoft made it absolute complicated to find code for the right solution as they changed their API over the years a couple of times.)

This is a huge step on Windows as now you could use MPMP also for Windows 7, have better streaming support and on top of that you get a Youtube player!

The only drawback is that you don’t have the same performance like MF but for HD playback it is not a problem. Only for 4K you need a more decent GPU.

After three months of hard work i finally released my crossplatform video solution for Unity3d.
With this solution we Unity3d developers have now a unified video platform with a unified APIs and the best native performance.

There are several video plugins right available but there was no solution that gives you the best performance on all major platforms or you have to buy several expensive plugins and hack them together. So i decided to make my own solution to have the full control over such a complex system. I try to improve the system as much as i can over time and i’m open to user feedback.

More info here or at the Unity Assetstore !

To get up do date with openframeworks I made some audioreactive demos to show what you can do with this great framework.

I had a long list of very cool demos/examples from others and made some remixes of their work. It also was a good exercise to transfer older code to the latest 0071 version and to convert  code to compile with VS2010. Most of the examples you get on Github are cool but only act as a starting point for own extensions. As an old multitouch dude the first obligation is to add TUIO support so you can play in an interactive way with the system.

My first demo is a remix of the Binned Particels Example from Kyle McDonald:

The Original example has no color and only has some mouse interaction, so I decided to extend this demo with TUIO input, audio forces and some color/blend stuff for better visual appealing.

The next demo is a remix of the great MPM Fluid from Grant Kot (Golan Levin OF implementation):

You can achieve a lot of  behaviours when you play with the different parameters.

The next one is my own implementation of a 2d metablob/metaball shader in openframeworks. (Don’t know exactly where I got all the code inspiration, but it’s based on some work from Adrian Boeing) :

As you can see the shader implementation make it posible to render a lot of blobs with a high framerate.

The last one is a remix of Memo Aktens MSAOpenCL  addon. Thanks to Matt Gingold who made some WIndows addition to the code, otherwise I had stumbled right at the beginning to get the example running on my PC as the original code is only for Mac. Anyway it was hard to do because it’s based on OpenCL:

I always dreamed of some particle system where you can move 1 million particles in realtime.  It’s not so easy to get into the OpenCL development and it’s a lot of trial&error as you have just limited debugging capabilities. But now I have some feeling how to think in the “OpenCL way”.

After working on the back-end site i ‘m now dealing with the front-end for multi-touch applications. After some research i come finally to the incredible MT4J framework. As I’m a real java fan i pleased to see that this framework exists and it’s absolutely brilliant! I don’t know what this guy is doing all the time but he is a master of software architecture & openGL . It’s impressive to see what performance boost you get if you work with openGL in the right way.With this framework your are able to concentrate on the interaction design and you could integrate stuff from processing, so there are a lot of code floating around the web you could use.

It’s a big argument to stay on the java platform.I know most of the people love Flash, but java is in my opinion generally the greatest platform you can develop with. You got eclipse, processing,server&database stuff, openGL with jogl and a lot of physical computing code with wiring for the arduino board. And the language itself is a thousand times better to deal with as with C++.