How to do a grid of videos?

On 8/15/07, wrybread wrote:
>
>
> I'm new to Jitter and Max and trying to make a 4 x 4 grid of videos, each
> clickable.
>
> I've been using this page as a starting point:
>
> http://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/IAP2004/JitterExamples.htm
>
> Am I correct in thinking I'll be laying out the videos as a jit.matrix?
> Note that I don't need any processing on these videos, just simply play them
> in a loop.
>
> Any tips would be hugely appreciated.

I think you might be confused on jit.matrix. It IS the actual video, the
matrix of pixels representing one frame of video / image.

There are several ways to do what you want. These are the 2 most obvious I
can think of:

simpel:
- stream/map the 16 videos into one jit.matrix using the @dstdimstart and
@dstdimend attributes on your grid matrix. Changing them for every input
video to to position each in its right place.

flexible:
- stream each video to a jit.gl.texture
- draw a jit.gl.videoplane with @automatic 0 on each position for every
frame, changing its texture name to the corresponding video texture for each
position. Thus drawing the same jit.gl.videoplane on a different position
with a different texture 16 times for every frame.

For the clicking you need to do some kind of mouse event handling. Again 2
ways to do this:

simpel:
- catch the mouse information from jit.pwindow / jit.window out of the right
outlet. Determine which video is hit using basic max objects.

flexible:
- attach an EventListener to your window using JavaScript. Use its callback
function to determine which video is hit.

If you really don't want to do any processing or more advanced interaction,
you're probably better of using the simple approach.

If you go for the 2nd approach I strongly recommend to do it all in
JavaScript. There are tutorials available in the standard Jitter
documentation for each of the steps I described, so you'll have to do a bit
of reading and research. The advantage of the 2nd approach is that it will
be really easy to add whatever processing or animation you want later on if
you do decide to get more fancy.

Here's an example of a similar approach I used to animate a grid of photo's
(same thing really): http://www.sndwrx.com/index.php?page=daisy

I used the word "simple" relative to the other approach. I'm not saying
you're an idiot if you can't get the first approach to work ;-)

Hope this helps and good luck.

Thijs

http://www.nano-soundworks.com