All kinds of win
Pretty winning day, today. The weather was mild enough to ride my bike into work, which I love to do when possible. Then my friend Morgus, who was in town on business, dropped in. I figured out the memory problem with his wife's computer (turns out the old Dell motherboard wouldn't take a 1GB memory DIMM - it just let out a drone on startup with a 1GB. We settled for 512MB... turned out that it topped out at 1GB total anyway.) In gratitude he took me to lunch at Smiley's and we had some great conversation; even brainstormed a hypothetical episode of his show! Then it was back to work until work time was over and I got back to the 'C.O.G. backscreen video computer' project.

I'm working on replacing the very aged Amiga 3000 that I use to serve video during the C.O.G. stage shows. That computer, while state of the art for its day, is amazingly far over the hill now - we're talking 25Mhz + 16MB of RAM and a 1GB SCSI II drive here - and it's MAXED OUT! Wow. But after seeing the 'Butthole Surfers' set last Sunday, I realized that I HAD to do better video-wise, and a big upgrade would needed to serve up fluid streaming video. I'm not going to just use DVD players like they do (I insist on keeping the same tight sync to our music via midi, and the ability to do endless looping where necessary.) So I'm replacing 'Elan Performer' and Amiga with a modern PC running Dee Sampler.

Dee Sampler is a strange program written by one of the guys from the band Klaatu. It's a shareware program that seems to be originally intended for MIDI based loop sample playback, and the latest version adds all kinds of LFO control over the samples. But it can also do hair-trigger video playback, streamed from hard disk. And it does it quite well, in a manner quite similar to old Elan Performer. It can apparently use any method of video compression supported by DirectX, which is apparently what it uses to facilitate playback. The author in fact recommends DiVX, and in testing I was able to encode DiVX video files that were very small and broadcast quality, in any arbitrary resolution. And this program can start playback on them virtually instantaneously. I have absolutely no idea how the author managed that, but it works.

So my task was figuring out the best platform for this to deliver DVD-smooth playback of hundreds of arbitrary video loops, instantly. The computer is a DELL, sporting a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of memory, and a Radeon 7500 video card with S-video and composite outputs. After trying Windows 98 with no swap file, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, I have pretty much settled on XP which delivered the smoothest frame rate through the Radeon. I still can't understand why XP was smoother than 2000, but after messing with it for a few hours, I decided that results are all that's relevant here. I was able to get the system to boot very quickly and get the program ready to run its show script with no intervention. The only major difference in execution is that Dee Sampler has a wider range on the keyboard (Elan Performer maps midi notes to keyboard keys, and this maps the midi notes straight to WAV or AVI files) and this program uses program changes rather than note on commands to switch between song script files. That's pretty much it; I might even stick with the equivalent video scripts just to make the transition easier.

On the other hand, this is also an opportunity to move way up if I choose. For instance, I need to settle on a display resolution (Dee Sampler doesn't scale video at all, it just maps it 1:1 to the screen.) So I have to decide now before doing anything. Should I go for HD? Should I do widescreen or 4:3? Hmmmmm. SVGA (800x600) seemed to playback really smoothly, and that's neither wide nor is it full HD - but it IS better than what I'm looking at now, and it's also the native rez of the projector I currently have. Also, I'll be sampling a lot of DVD movies for material, and that's only 720x480, so I'll be scaling up video for the most part. I'll probably go with 800x600, even though going with 640x480 would be the easiest way to go, albeit not necessarily the best looking.

Finally I'll leave you with some new C.O.G. fan art by Vid Vicious - proving that C.O.G. was indeed born in the South... PARK that is... (click to embiggen)