finally,

after quite some months in development and testing we are happy to announce the availability (in alpha builds) of Player (EX9.Texture). It was developed in collaboration with and initiated and sponsored by eno | nsynk.

The idea was to have a professional/highperformance alternative of playing back videos based on stacks of images instead of video files. The node is quite versatile/spreadable and does the heavy datahandling a background thread. Check its helppatch for instructions.

here is to introduce a new primitive (node-)datatype. so next to value, string, ... transform there is now: raw

nothing to get too excited about as long as you're not dealing with device-communication and raw-byte handling.

if that is what you do though, this is your lucky day. instead of misusing strings as bytearrays (which you had to do in vvvv until now - and you can still do) there is now a native raw (byte) datatype. so think no more Ord (String) and SpellValue (String) but instead:

• AsRaw(Value)
• AsRaw(String)
• AsValue(Raw)
• AsString(Raw)

make sure to check the helppatches of those to get all their details.

further the following nodes now have raw inputs:

• UDP (Network Server)
• UDP (Network Client)
• TCP (Network Server)
• TCP (Network Client)
• RS232 (Devices)
• Reader (Raw)
• Writer (Raw)

still the old versions of those nodes with string inputs are available as modules and versioned "string".

so this is to distinguish more clearly between string and byte-handling and should also have a positive influence on performance in situations where string/byte conversions can now be omitted.

please give it a run and let us know what you think.
as always get the latest from here: alpha builds

oui this maybe a small step for yousers but it is definitely a big step for vvvvs codebase. advancing it by about 10 years letting it finally arrive in ~2007 (yep, still some more to catch up..). so what happened? vvvv is now fully unicorn..ah unicode. from highest to lowest bit.

good to know

for most of you this will not change anything except that you don't have to deal with UTF8 vs. ANSI in IOBoxes or on specific nodes (e.g. Text (EX9)) anymore. as from now on there is only unicorn..code. that is: inside of vvvv.

when getting strings into vvvv you may have to specify an encoding. for those special cases the Reader/Writer nodes got a (visible in inspektor only) Encoding. its default should work in 99% of all cases for you. for the Reader (File) the default setting of Auto will work if the file is encoded in the current system codepage or UTF8, else you'll have to chose the specific codepage manually. for the Writer (File) the Auto setting means it will write files as UTF8.

the deal

doing those changes under the hood caused quite a stir in the codebase and while our tests show all green we're still a bit cautious with merging those changes in our main alpha-branch. therefore we're asking you to give this a ride with your patches using the latest unicorn-build from:

 unicorn-builds

don't forget the suitable addonpack and run your patches with it. what would be interesting to hear tested, are:

• boygrouping
• networking (osc,..)
• arduinoing (rs232,..)
• file reading/writing
• general string-heavy patches

nota bene:

• saving a patch with unicorn-characters in alphaXE2 will not let you open the same patch in older vvvv releases. if you still need to do so there is a way... bug us in the alpha-forum for more information.
• MySQL nodes had to be removed (for now)

now please give us a quick feedback in the comments if that fukcs everything up for you or you'd say it basically works. if you find a specific bugger -> alpha forum.

Motivation & Concept

We added nodes that ease the creation and analyzation of xml documents.

Documents are represented by Elements and Attributes - not strings, which helps performance...
You now can easily get some parts of your document and route those as a spread of Elements to other parts of your patch, where they get further analyzed.
You always can convert an element to a simple string via AsString (Object) - or back to an element via AsElement (XML). But typically you only want to do that once: when reading from disk or writing to disk. For the rest working with Elements and Attributes is much more comfortable.

Joining & Splitting

There are nodes with which you can easily join & split XML-Elements (aka Tags) and Attributes: Element (XML Join), Element (XML Split), Attribute (XML Join), Attribute (XML Split).

Note that by concatinating several Element (XML Split) nodes - which also outputs an elements' child elements - will give you the possibility to dig into the xml structure. E.g. you could retrieve all child elements of an element, check its properties and dependant of some test select some of the childs via Select (Node). You therefore could patch a query into your xml structure...
However this can get complicated and so we added some more nodes:

Handy nodes for analyzing XML

With GetElements & GetAttributes we added different ways of searching for child tags and attributes.
When searching by name you get those that have a certain tag or attribute name and are direct child elements or attributes of the specified element.
do that with GetElements (XML ByName) & GetAttributes (XML ByName)

When searching by XPath you can express a more complex query that allows you dig deeper...
do it with GetElements (XML ByXPath) & GetAttributes (XML ByXPath)

While those nodes are flexible and spreadable in means of what you are searching for, they might be a bit unhandy when you already know that at a certain point in your patch only a certain tag with certain attributes are of interest.

For those cases we added Prune (XML) which lets you set those tag and attribute names statically in configuration pins with the bonus that you get friendly pin names and dont need to further process your attribute data.

For being really sure that your patch system can work with a certain xml-File or string you can check validity with IsValid (XML RelaxNG). link: RelaxNG
Both XML Syntax (.rng-Files) & Compact Syntax (.rnc-Files) are supported.

Sponsoring

Thanks to our MESO for putting those node on our agenda and for sponsoring.