BLACK FUGDAY 2017

BLACK FRIDAY 2017

We have a special deal on Painting With Light easy video mapping software: 40% off until Sunday 26th!

Also, the new FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 are now available:

bigfug FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 on Windows

bigfug FFGL plugins for Resolume 6 on macOS

Finally, Fugio – my node based multimedia programming environment – continues to be free and open source, so no further discount is possible, however if you’re in a giving mood, donations are always welcome!

Happy Friday!

Resolume 6 and bigfug FFGL plugins

Resolume 6 just came out of beta in the last couple of weeks and I’ve been getting a steady stream of emails from people who find that my FFGL plugins don’t work with it.

UPDATE: Plugins now available for Windows and macOS

This is because – until now – most FFGL utilising software (including Resolume 2, 3, 4, and 5) have been 32-bit based.  Now, with Resolume 6, they’ve gone 64-bit only, which is a great move that I applaud!  If you’re not sure what all this 32/64 bit stuff means, click here to find out!

This means that all existing FFGL plugins (including mine) need to be upgraded to 64-bit in order to work with Resolume 6.

The good news is that I’m working on this right now and should be releasing them in time for Black Friday (24th November 2017).

fugFeedback working in Resolume 6

The other good news is that fugFeedback now works on layers, and fugScope is now a source plugin, not an effect.

There isn’t really any bad news, other than we now have lots of you out there who are probably have some questions about migrating to the new plugins.

Firstly, there will not be an automatic upgrade.  I think you’d agree that the plugins are really cheap so if you can afford to be running Resolume, I reckon you can afford to buy the plugins again.  All the money goes to supporting creative software development and art!

Secondly, I’ve had people buying the 32-bit plugins for Resolume 6 and emailing me that they don’t work.  If you bought these plugins since the beginning of October 2017, I will give you a free voucher so you can get the 64-bit ones when they are released.

Let me know any comments, suggestions, or queries you may have!

Fugio Friday: The Rabbit Hole

You may have noticed a slight break down in the regularity of these posts of late, which is due to too much work rather than a lack of it!

Those of you following Fugio’s progress will know that I’m working hard on supporting the Raspberry Pi as a primary platform.

Recently I got very excited due to the release of Raspbian Stretch, with it’s new experimental OpenGL driver that allows Fugio (and many other applications) to run accelerated graphics within the desktop windowed environment, which is how things work on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  This is what I was showing off at Ars Electronica a few weeks back.

The next stage was to add the code so Fugio could access the Raspberry Pi’s amazing media processing hardware for decoding and encoding H264 HD video, audio, and other tricks.  This is where things started to get tricky…

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks learning about how the new RPi driver, called VC4, plays with the existing systems, specifically the OpenMAX API’s for video decoding.  On the face of it, everything looked like it should play well together.

I won’t bore you by describing the interminable range of combinations I’ve tried, usually resulting in hour long compilations of Qt with different variations of OpenGL, but there were a lot!

Turns out that the new VC4 driver is incompatible with OpenMAX, and to further complicate things, the accelerated EGL/GLES libraries are now renamed to libbrcmEGL.so and libbrcmGLESv2.so, with the standard libEGL/libGLESv2 libraries being Mesa implementations with software rendering, so just disabling the VC4 driver doesn’t wholly fix the problem as Qt seems a bit hard coded to look for libEGL/libGLESv2.

So, now I’m a left a little confused as to what happens with OpenMAX under VC4.  Will it be replaced by something else or will it be made compatible?  If you know, please enlighten me 🙂

The current status for Fugio is that it’s working great under VC4, and is probably the best and easiest entry for users to get it running on a Pi.  While the OpenGL stuff works great, I can’t (yet) support accelerated media processing.  Therefore, I plan to do release Fugio on the Pi like this for now, which I plan to do in the next couple of weeks.

For my own projects where I need the acceleration, I’m planning to drop back to Raspbian Jessie and use the old drivers that are compatible with OpenMAX.

Anyway, that’s where we’re at.  I’m off to Birmingham, Dublin, and Paris next week…

PS: do please consider giving a bit of regular funding to help Fugio along via Patreon.  It really helps keep up the enthusiasm levels for working on open source software when hitting big roadblocks like this one.  Even 1$ a month is really appreciated, thanks!

Fugio Friday: Ars Electronia Report

Happy Fugio Friday!

And for those of you who signed up to the mailing list at Ars Electronica: welcome!

For those who weren’t in Linz, we were showing off the latest Fugio build running various patches, including a native OpenGL ES on a Raspberry Pi 3.  There were also Fugio badges, stickers, and lots of interesting conversations!

 

There was a great deal of interest in the Raspberry Pi build, and several people suggested how it could be an excellent platform for educational programs, and cost effective too!

We also had several conversations on the topic of long term preservation of digital art, which is something I’ve built into the heart of Fugio since day one.

It was great to introduce people to Fugio in person and see their reactions and get their impressions of the software through fresh eyes.  It’s given me some good ideas for how I want to proceed in the future with new tutorials and features.

For now, I’m focussing on native audio and video playback on the Raspberry Pi as my next major task.  Will keep you posted…

As ever, please send me your ideas, feedback, and news of any Fugio projects that you’re working on, and have a great weekend!

Fugio Friday: Ars Electronica

Happy Fugio Friday!

It’s great to be back in Linz for Ars Electronica 2017.  Have already caught up with many friends from around the world and seen some lovely works, though the event is so huge that there is still so much to be seen.

In preparation for the Mini Maker Faire in POSTCITY on Sunday I have got Fugio badges and stickers ready to give away, so if you’re at Ars Electronica, do stop by and see Fugio in action.

My laptop is now 500% better with a shiny new Fugio sticker on it…

Will post up pictures from the event next week.

Have a great weekend!

Fugio Friday: New Logo and Easy Shader 2D

Happy Fugio Friday!

And I am happy to show off the excellent new Fugio logo that was kindly created by designer Eleanor Hyland-Stanbrook.  Thank you, Eleanor!  As we speak it is being made into laptop stickers and pin badges that will be available at the upcoming Ars Electronica Mini Maker Faire.

If you’re not able to make it to Linz but you still want a sticker/badge, I will be sending them out to all the lovely people who are supporting Fugio on Patreon (don’t forget to enter your shipping address!).

Work has been continuing on the updated OpenGL implementation and I’ve created a new, and much simpler way of using 2D shaders.

While Fugio aims to provide the most flexible access to the underlying technologies, this can sometimes result in having to use a lot of nodes, and this is very obvious when creating an OpenGL shader.  The current wobbly kitten shader example looks like this:

That’s a lot of nodes!  However, with the new Easy Shader 2D node that I’m working on, it now looks like this:

That’s eight less nodes, which means less clutter and the patch being easier to navigate. It also works on both desktop and Raspberry Pi.  Additionally, you can still use the existing shader nodes if you need the extra power and control they give you.

The code for this is in GitHub now if you want to try it out but a binary release is a little while off while I continue work on the Raspberry Pi support.

Have a great weekend!

Fugio Friday: Ars Electronica Mini Maker Faire in Linz

Happy Fugio Friday!

This week it was confirmed that Fugio will have its very own stand at the Mini Maker Faire Linz, in Austria as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2017.

We’ll be introducing Fugio to visitors and helping them make some patches with MIDI controllers, lights, sounds, and probably some bananas.

We’ll also be showing Fugio running on Raspberry Pi with the new OpenGL support in place, as can be seen running in this short video where Fugio is being synchronised between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi 3.

Hopefully we’ll have some badges to give away too!

The Mini Maker Faire will be at POSTCITY on Sunday, September 10, 2017, 10 AM-7 PM

Hope to see you there!

Fugio Friday: August 2017 WIP

Happy Fugio Friday!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on refactoring the whole OpenGL plugin to better support Raspberry Pi.

The new release of the Raspberry Pi operating system called Raspbian Stretch has Qt 5.7 built in and comes with FFMPEG instead of libav.  This is great news for Fugio as it’s much more in line with the libraries we’ve been using.

I’m busy building Fugio on my Raspberry Pi 3 (not cross compiling) as I type, although I wouldn’t recommend trying this yourself just yet as it needs some work to get it compiling.

With this latest update, I should be able to create a binary repository for installing Fugio onto Pi’s without compiling.

As ever, this is loads of work that will be available to everyone for free, so if you can, please consider supporting the project by donating just $1 a month via Patreon.

Also, check out the first look at my new projector blending tool that Fugio will support for multi-screen projections.

Have a great weekend!

fugBlender: Multiple Video Projector Blending Tool (WIP)

I’m currently working on a new software tool for working with multiple video projectors, allowing them to be overlaid and creating bigger (or brighter) projections.

It’s very quick and easy to layout and blend the projectors together, and once done, the tool can show video streamed using Syphon (on Mac), Spout (on Windows), and NDI (on Mac/Windows/Linux).

It supports any number of projectors, and devices such as Matrox’s TripleHead2Go.

fugBlender is currently still in development but if you want to hear when it’s released, join the bigfug software newsletter:

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