VP is a replacement for the video consumer portion of everyone's favourite tool vic. VP offers a much improved user experience with, for example, automatic grouping of video tiles by site. Highly customizable, current features of VP include:

• Site grouping
• Site-tile and display manager
• Smooth scaling
• Support for H.261, H.263+, MJPEG, MPEG4, and DV codecs
• Ports to Linux, Windows and the Mac
• Can customize automatic layout using Python scripts

Please note, VP uses OpenGL hardware-assist to offload work to the GPU. VP currently allows for smooth scaling of video tiles to any size, and in future, to have a very rich 3-D textured user interface. Almost all decent graphics cards today have hardware OpenGL support. Where people sometimes have problems is:

• OpenGL available on only some cards off a multi-head system. Having an AGP and a PCI version of the same card (or at least the same family) usually solves this issue.
• Primary and secondary monitors the wrong way round on the display and the console. You want the high-quality video to go to the display, not the console (right?).

We think it's worthwhile getting this issue sorted out, especially as the AG becomes a richer user experience. In most cases, problems are solved with software (new drivers, configuring the drivers/OS) or buying another graphics card for a few hundred dollars. If you have OpenGL on only some of your outputs, then VP will still happily run on those outputs.

Finally, note that vic and VP will happily co-exist. That is, you can have both the stock (vic) consumer service run simultaneously with the VPConsumerService.

Releases

login or register to post comments