Starting to be a little disheartened with Pangolin Quick Show

[flecom]

well in all fairness for planetarium style shows ADAT still is pretty much the standard

[james]

Gary, you keep dreaming while the rest of us find utility in reality.

[JohnYayas]

Thank you. I definitely choose to be a dreamer over someone stuck on the same old junk. There was a time when I had a dream to create my own laser show software because the rest of what was available was either crap that looked like a DOS application and had to be run via a Virtual Machine on Knoppix or it was too expensive for me. People said I was a fool when I said I would do it. But I did it... maybe not the best laser software but it does what I need it to do. I could have gone with the status quo but the journey would not have been as sweet. So, keep on using your WAV files, ADATs, and whatever else you use and keep on writing software that you can't even give away for free or running planetarium shows that no one goes to anymore. I really don't care.

But, to reel this is, I have no desire to create a new show format because I don't have time to deal with this kind of nonsense. I only mentioned it in response to the assertion that the ILDA file format is inadequate. On one hand you say it is badly designed. On the other you basically have the exact same thing but encoded as a WAV file. The only difference is that you can play a WAV file with Media Player. If you are happy with the sophistication of Media Player as a laser display platform, then good for you. I can think of much better ways to do things, though. But then again, I am a dreamer so I am not stuck within the confines of what has already been created. I am very happy to create what I want even it doesn't already exist.

[james]

You don't use it so you have no idea of its character or worth. You also haven't spent any time or imagination trying to get anything out of it. It takes a bit more thought than Media Player.

If you "don't have time to deal with this kind of nonsense" then drop it and stop dumping your emotional crap on something that actually works.

Just accept the fact that you don't use it. You don't know about it. And you won't let yourself see any value in it.

James.

[JohnYayas]

I know it sucks.

[james]

That's really mature, intelligent and professional of you Gary.

Maybe you should spend your time using cassette tapes and inventing new uses for used condoms.

James.

[JohnYayas]

Garbage in, garbage out.

[james]

Well, not for your benefit, but for that of anyone else reading this thread, there is one huge difference between wave and ILDA.

Yes they both store full color vector art, but wave is intrinsically locked to time with a sample rate, frame markers, key frame markers, optimization factors, time difference between scanners and colors per color, and possibly even color correction per color channel. Plus there may be stereo audio and time code for external time locked devices.

ILDA has none of that.

It is also in a state that is immediately useful when streamed with no calculations necessary. It does not even require a whole computer to read it from ROM and shove it into a DAC. It works in every OS and even non-computer based players.

James.

[JohnYayas]

Riddle me this Einstein. How big would a 48kbps wave file be in order to encapsulate a single white dot at coordinates (0, 0) for 60 minutes? Lets also say you have 4 scanners and none of the lasers are matched. So, how many WAV files do you need to in order to create the same looking white dot on all 4 projects. Multiple the size of the WAV file you created in step 1 by the number of wav files needed to satisfy part 2. Tell me how much space that require. You can assume 16 bit samples.

If I were to create a nifty show format I would specify the point coordinates once and with a repeat value of 60 minutes or whatever that converts to in frames per second. The player software would handle any correction. I would leave it to the implementer to come up with their own algorithms for that. So, the file size would be somewhere around 11 bytes long. 7 bytes for the coordinate and 4 bytes for the repeat count.

[james]

WOW! One full hour of six projectors featuring a single white dot! That sounds like a fantastic show! Would you be offering pre-sale tickets to that? Can I order now?

You can make a wave file of only a few samples and loop it indefinitely. Like I said before, LaserBoy can do color re-scaling. A 256 element table of 14 bit translations can be stored in the header for each of possibly four color control channels in the wave. This means that the byte values found in the vector art on the computer can be exchanged for any positive 14 bit values in the wave, and translated back to the correct byte values when opening the wave back into LaserBoy.

The LaserBoy wave header also has a matrix that identifies the contents of every track and how many significant bits it is, plus global and individual track polarity indicators.

You just can't image how these thing might work because you refuse to do so.

James.