Just something I have been thinking about. Right now the only commonly supported, open format for laser show software to transfer data from one another is the ILDA format.. But I think we can all agree that it has a lot of problems. To name some:
- No good way of storing full info on title, author etc, just a couple of tiny, fixed 8 byte fields
- No info on timing (scanrate, frames per seconds etc)
- No backwards compatibility between formats, some projectors and software etc can still only read legacy format 0 without full RGB data
- No compression
- No encryption
- Ambiguity when separating frames into different projectors/layers
- No possibility to store audio as well
This has arguably contributed a lot to the state of the market we are seeing now, with the leading company all but abandoning the ILD format in favor of their own proprietary formats that don't work with any other software, leading to less consumer freedom and less innovation.
I'm wondering if maybe there is interest in a community effort to come up with a new format to fix most or all of the problems with the ILDA formats. The authors of most of the software used in the scene are members here so we could get it widely supported if we really want to.
There's the wave format used in f.ex. LaserBoy, which fixes a few of the problems but far from all, and its biggest strength, that it can be played directly on sound cards is maybe less relevant these days now that sound card dacs are less popular.
Just throwing it out there. It would require quite a bit of work and most developers are probably very busy as is, but I think it would be very beneficial to the community if executed well.
Bonus laugh:
https://xkcd.com/927/