Assignment Description
Simple Synch Youtube Rips
Look at the synchronization utility I made in max, and see if you can get at least two computers to synch up some kind of video playback. More computers could be even more interesting.
My Patch
Initially I had a lot of ideas about where to go with this assignment. Unfortunately I'm brand new to MAX 6, and the learning curve is a little steep. That said, initially I was thinking about a four computer arrangement. These four laptops would be arranged in a "x" formation, with a laptop at each point of the "x." Computers that were across from one another would stream of the video from the built-in cameras to the opposite screen. The resulting experience for the observer would be looking at a screen that was always displaying the viewer's back. This configuration required that the video stream be passed over TCP/IP to the other computer. While this was a great start, ultimately I had to move a different direction - I ended up experiencing a fair amount of difficulty passing a video signal over TCP/IP. I'm sure that this can be done, but I wasn't having any luck and needed to move on.
In moving forward, however, I stumbled upon Dude873's video reverb patch. After following along with his tutorial I was able to successfully replicate his patch and the effect that it created. Moving forward I loaded the patch onto two computers and made a few small changes. Specifically, I created a patch that had a udpsend object and a patch that had a udpreceive object. These objects watch the network for an incoming signal to initialize the webcam and to start the effect. The control computer starts and stops the effect on both machines. Hit the video below to see how this works, and download the max patches if you'd like to experiment yourself.
Video
My Video Reverb Patches
Video Reverb Send Maxpat
Video Reverb Receive Maxpat
