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I’m quite excited about this new release of Gem, one of the most used video library for Pure Data aka Pd.
Check the highlights below to get a glimpse of new features and fixed issues.
Follows the original message from Gem mantainer IOhannes Zmoelnig:

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“After long years of waiting (foir you) and hard labour (for me), Gem 0.93 has been released today.
large parts of the underlying engine have been re-written to give you a better experience!
binaries are available for w32 (installer & zip), for the brave and adventurous there is the source code.
binaries for OSX and not available yet, but we hope to get them online soonish.

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grab it while it’s hot: http://gem.iem.at/releases/0.93.0

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alternatively you can get the files from
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pd-gem

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highlights
==========

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Objects
——-
frei0r video plugins support

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- [mesh], [surface3d],…
- [separator] now takes arguments to define which stacks to push/pop

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documentation
————-
- numerous bigfixes and improvements

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extra
—–
- [pix_fiducialtrack] is no more part of Gem (but comes bundled with Gem)
- [pix_artoolkit] fiducial tracking using ARToolKit
- [pix_drum], [pix_mano]: Jaime Olivier’s analysis objects!

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plugins
——-
image acquisition is now factored out into “plugins” this means that you can e.g. easily add new image acquisition methods to the existing [pix_video], [pix_film] and [pix_image] objects

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- still image loading/saving now uses plugins on all platforms on w32 you can now use ImageMagick and/or QuickTime for loading/saving images, which greatly increases the number of supported formats. you now get programmatic feedback on image loading success…
- video acquisition now uses plugins on all platforms uniform way to get or set properties/attributes/controls, like hue, saturation, shutter-speed, pan,… working DV support (on linux)
V4L also works with newer kernels (that dropped v4l)
support for IIDC
support for industrial grade GigE cameras using 3rd party libraries such as PYLON, Halcon or AVT’s PvAPI experimental UNICAP support
- film acquisition now uses plugins on all platforms (you could use gmerlin on w32 or osx…)
- recording (film output) now uses plugins on all platforms support for V4L2 (and V4L) loopback devices, in order to generate a fake live video from your Gem window – use it for recording, streaming,…

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settings
——–
global & local settings files to modify the overall behaviour of Gem you don’t like Gem’s default framerate, windowsize, font, texture mode,…? change it once and for all

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internals
———
- API: this is the first Gem with a “public” API: a selection of headers that you can use to write your own Gem-plugins build-system
- build system: completely switched to a proper autotools
- openGL: updated bundled GLEW
- source organization: re-organized the entire source tree for hopefully better maintainability

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lowlights
=========
i need an OSX developer willing to spend some time in getting image acquisition and windowing to work on OSX>=10.6 (x86_64)”

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This is absolutely brilliant, if you are a fan of noise synths you can’t miss this one.

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From the website (by Martin Howse and others the creators of Blackdeath):

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“Inspired in part by Leif Elggren’s Virulent Images/Virulent Sound (if images can be virulent, can sound be virulent too?), blackdeath is the first open hardware/free software noise synthesiser with the plague inside.
Embedding epidemic and plague simulations amongst other data generation algorithms for granular re-synthesis of incoming audio signals or self-generated feedback, blackdeath represents a virulent yet highly controllable noise/audio engine with built-in, switchable distortion.”

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Further info at http://1010.co.uk/org/blackdeath.html

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Make sure to check out the other works of the Berlin/London group, you will find some inspiring insights on software, metasoftware and data aesthetics.
http://www.1010.co.uk/org/

It has been a long long summer. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to keep up with the blog, have been travelling and working too much and, yes, I was also on holiday at some point.
I’ve been mostly touring with my new biophysical wearable technology Xth Sense and a related solo piece; I was lucky enough to have a fitted schedule including workshops, performances and presentations at the Danish National School of Contemporary Dance, BEAM festival, ICMC, Pure Data Convention and noise=noise in London.
I know there’s no excuse for such a long silence!! but please, forgive me…