Faster! Faster!

I second the notion of speed!

Does it require a faster vid. card, or does it have more to do with the now old Linux Kernel? Maybe both?

I think there is work being done to speed some of this up in v1.4.0 for the console.

Any enlightenment from the Gurus?
:notworthy:

Marty and Dave,

We are aware of the current problems related to views and we are continuing to make improvements to them with each release. This is a high priority issue and we hope to have them working much better as soon as possible.

One thing that can help is to only use external monitors when really needed and if not using any external monitors, ensure that they are disabled in the control panel. Even if they are not plugged in, you will notice a slow down if they are enabled.

thanks,

I'm assuming you mean "(in the meantime) use external monitors only when needed"
Dave

Dave,

Yes that would be a correct assumption.

Brad,

Does the resolution setting of the externals make any difference in the speed?

Scott,

Absolutely, as does the refresh rate.

Think of it this way:

Running the 2 internal monitors at 800 x 600 @ 60Hz, we are drawing 960,000 pixels (800 x 600 x 2) 60 times each second, or 57,600,000 pixels per second.

Enabling both external monitors at 1280 x 1024 @ 75 Hz, this adds 196,608,000 pixels each second (1280 x 1024 x 2 x 75).
Some of this load is handled by the video card and not the CPU, so it won't directly affect the response of the console, but if you put windows that have lots of constantly changing data on these screens, like the Output window, Cuelist windows, or the DMX window, the processing for updating the data in these windows is handled by the processor on the motherboard and that can have a noticable effect on the responsiveness of the console.

We are currently working hard to improve performance in ways that would directly benifit these specific situations, but for now the best advice is to minimize your external monitor resolution and refresh rate, be careful about which windows you have open, or disable one or both external monitors to increase the performance and responsiveness of the console.

Well Tom... You'll love this.

I'd like a higher resolution available on the external monitors. Reason being, I'd like to be able to see, as an example, the whole output screen at once without having to scroll up/down or right/left. At the moment, I have to scroll right to see all of the parameters of my Studio Spots.

As Tim 'The Tool Man' says... "More power!"

Thanks.
Kerry

Kerry,

I'm actually glad that you revived this thread. I'd be curious to hear what folks have to say now that we've released v2.1 with all of its views performance improvements.

I certainly agree with you that it would be nice at times to be able to use higher resolutions on the external screens (although I'd then have to buy nicer touchscreens).

The limitation here is actually hardware. If you've ever opened the back of your Wholehog 3, you'll see that our motherboard is completely custom and that we don't use any PCI / AGP / PCI Express cards. We use 2 video chips to control the 4 screens, but they are only 4MB each, with each chip running 1MB for an internal screen and 3MB for an external screen. This allows us 800x600 for the internal screen and a max of 1280x1024 for the external, both at 16 bit colour depth.

Increasing the maximum resolution of the external screens would require a motherboard replacement.

The good news is that the Hog iPC allows higher resolutions on the external screen and that on the Wholehog 3 console, with our recent views work, will properly recall window scroll positions and the Jump toolbar should be working well.

I hope this answers your question.

Tom,

I haven't updated to v2.1 yet. I haven't had the time to back up all of my shows and do the update. Nice to know that view performance was improved with the latest update. May have to find time to do all of the back-ups.

I wouldn't mind bigger touch screens. I generally like to be able to see everything at once. If the motherboard gets updated at some point in the future, add functionality for 2 more external touch screens. My Hog is in a high school, you can't have enough monitors.

If you built a motherboard with substantially better video chips and capability, I'd buy it.

Was there a specific reason why the 16 bit color was chosen? Color picker perhaps?

Not to change the subject of the thread, but is there a way to use the USB ports on the HogIII console to dump a show file onto a flash drive?

Thanks,
Kerry

Kerry,

I believe that the embedded video solution that we use (not unlike many that were available at the time the motherboard was designed) actually is limited to a maximum resolution of 1280x1024. With the amount of memory we have and what we need to drive, we had available memory to run at 16 bit colour depth.

You're right that most of our application would probably look fine with fewer colours, but the colour picker would definitely take a hit and this gives us options for nicer icons and will be very helpful as we look forward to features like media server integration.

We are currently working on adding support for USB mass storage devices. The problem is that our current linux kernel (2.4.19) has really bad support for them. We're working on a kernel upgrade, but that requires a compiler upgrade, and the new compiler is a bit more strict than what we'd been running in the past.

Our developer working on the compiler port is nearly complete and we've documented the few kernel modifications that we have. I can't make any promises about dates, but most of the difficult parts of implementing USB drives are being completed right now as a part of a separate project. I'm hoping to see USB drive support in the not-so-distant future.

[quote=teerickson]the new compiler is a bit more strict than what we'd been running in the past.
hooray! that's huge, and i'm thrilled.

out of nothing but sheer curiosity, can you speak to how and why the full III's and/or the OB's haven't moved to XPe? seems like targeting a single platform just isn't possible...?

So, Tom, what you're saying it that you pretty much need a whole new motherboard?

Shame on you for not thinking of every user request for every console you'd ever develop before hand. I guess I'll just have to find myself a new favorit lighting console.

Kerry

P.S. I'll get you some feedback when I go to v2.1.

Ok I have said this for years now the Hog 3 Is the best console out there but the motherboard was designed to slow not Highends bad they inherited
it so why not fix it now and and go forward and kick ass
So there is room for a new board in there charge old owners 1000 $ for a new
lighting fast one and put it in all new one and go back to the top of the console world and stop trying patch it upgrade it

Robin>>>> chew on that

Quinn,

Moving all of our console software and our nodes to Windows XPe would be a huge product and wouldn't necessarily offer our users any immediate or obvious advantages. We may head in the direction of a single OS in the future because this may offer us some convenience, but there are better places for us to be putting our development effort right now.

Kerry,

Yes. To upgrade our video hardware in the Wholehog 3 console, we would need a new motherboard. Remember that the first Wholehog 3s were sold in 2001 and the hardware design was probably being worked on for a couple of years before that. Current technology for embedded solutions in the late 1990's was significantly different than what we have available today.

Luckily, as I mentioned above, we don't see any evidence that the video chips are a performance bottleneck for us.