BlackSpout feedback

[jesse]

First off, I want to say a huge thank you for building the BlackSpout tool. I have used it extensively in a variety of live settings and it's worked flawlessly. This is a really vital contribution to the community and there are many of us out there using it.

I've encountered a slight hiccup in my intended use of BS and wonder if you have any thought on what could be the issue. I'm currently using a Razer Blade Pro laptop with a built in GTX 1080 card. I have a 4-camera system captured at 1080p60 via a Blackmagic Duo 2 card mounted in a Sonnet Thunderbolt 3 PCIe enclosure, which gives stable performance at low latency. The incoming frames are passed out via four instances of BlackSpout and this is quite stable and responsive.

I've recently upgraded to an eGPU scenario (Akitio Node Pro with a GTX 2080 ti). Unfortunately this seems to cause an issue that I can't troubleshoot any further. BlackSpout opens as usual, and I see a capture image in the BS preview window. However, the downstream Spout app (I've tried SpoutReceiver, Touch Designer, Max) receives only a black frame. It appears that the 1920 x 1080 metadata is being passed properly, but the texture data itself is not.

I wonder if this is an issue with the version of Spout that you've compiled BS against? I have tried using SpoutSender, the example app that comes with Spout, and it passes frames as expected while using the 2080 ti card. Any thoughts on this would be highly welcomed! I currently have Spout 2.06 installed.

[Magic]

I’m not sure, but if you have TouchDesigner, why wouldn’t you use that for capture?

[jesse]

There’s an advantage to offloading the capture to a separate process, which I’ve been doing for a while with great results. It also allows me to be flexible in how I’m routing the video signal rather than tying it to a specific platform.

[Magic]

That makes sense I guess. BlackSpout isn't being developed any more because the equivalent functionality was added to Magic (via the VideoCaptureDS module), which I suppose you could use in the same way as a separate process if you want. Multiple instances of Magic can be run at the same time.

[jesse]

Ok thanks for the reply. It's a shame that BS is no longer maintained but I do understand.