Hello there! I'm posting for the the first time but I am super thankful for everything I already learned from the forum!

For context: I built a patch with Gem that takes a webcam video and breaks it down to 40 individual squares. You can see the grid in the attached screenshot. Within each of the squares movement is registered via pix_movement2 and pix_blob. If the movement in one of the squares reaches a threshold, a drum sample is triggered (panned according to the relative position of the square.) That's the basic functionality and everything works so far, on mac as well as on raspberry. I use pd-l2ork, should that be of interest. The idea is to place a camera in front of a bird feeder so that birds can play cool free jazz drum solos when they move about.

Alternatively, I wanted to substitute the camera with a youtube livestream. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has wonderful bird feeder livestreams running 24/7. The problem is that I have no idea whatsoever how to route the videostream from youtube into Pd. Or, if that's even possible with Gem. I'm guessing, a solution might include some FFmpeg to set up a "device" for the stream, but I'm a little stumped at the moment. Could someone point me into the right direction? Thanks in advance!

I don't know how to do that, but if you want to use FFMPEG, there's an external for it, check here https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12980/ffplay-an-implementation-of-ffmpeg-for-audio-playback-of-almost-any-media-format

@alexandros Thanks for answering! I looked into the external but it only outputs audio, not video. Still nice to have!

Hi. I didn't try it but there is / was a gem-plugin-vlc that enables you to capture vlc output with pix_video.

@eelvshuman said:

The idea is to place a camera in front of a bird feeder so that birds can play cool free jazz drum solos when they move about.

I'm dying to see this!

@eelvshuman If you are using Windows then get the NDI runtime library from...... http://ndi.link/NDIRedistV5 .... and install it. GEM 64 bit complains anyway if you don't have it.

Get the latest version of Spout........ https://github.com/leadedge/Spout2/releases ... and follow the instructions on that page.

Open Gem and load [pix_video-help]
Open spoutsender.exe from the Spout DEMO folder.
Probably select device 1 in [pix_video-help], to see the Spout loopback output.
Your RPI will probably need a fan.

For a Mac the program will be Syphon rather than Spout
For Linux you will need a loopback driver...... probably from OBS studio.

[[[[[
TouchDesigner (free) has a SpoutOut "TOP" that will pop up in your Gem window (close Spoutsender.exe first).
You will like TouchDesigner anyway...!!!!!

TouchDesigner has a ScreenGrab Top..... but it is limited to 1280x1280 in the non-commercial version so you might need to reset your computer screen resolution.
It also has a Web Render top that will render HTML5...... so should work...... I will check it when I have downloaded the new version.
However, there might be a better solution for streaming a youtube video locally..... maybe VLC will allow that, but maybe YouTube will not...
Touchdesigner also has a Video Stream In....... in fact it has most things.
]]]]

EDIT
But forget the extra stage with TouchDesigner.....
Spout has a screen capture feature........ that can capture a display.... or a window....
https://github.com/leadedge/Win32CaptureSample/releases
Which I found by the link in this thread..
https://spout.discourse.group/t/connecting-to-spout-stream-on-second-pc/554
David.

I recenlty used OBS to capture different IP camera stream and get the image in pix_video using a virtual camera as output in OBS.

• First issue is that pix_video cannot get thevirtual camera texture under Windows or MacOS (https://github.com/umlaeute/Gem/issues/433)

• I changed to Ubuntu linux and a second issue was that RTSP stream doesn't work anymore under Ubuntu, so I installed a
  special version of VLC to allows RTSP and finally made a VLC source in OBS...

Thanks a lot for your answers and ideas!
@whale-av Thanks! I will look into Syphon immediately! Even though I've been working with Touchdesigner a lot, I never had the idea to combine Touchdesigner and Gem... Love the possibilities Touchdesigner offers, but for this I'm looking for a solution that won't fry my RPi. As you wrote: A fan is more than nice to have, even though a work with really small resolutions (hence the idea of a youtube 240p-Stream being just perfect).

@60hz Great! I did already look into OBS a bit but didn't know about the virtual camera feature - that sounds exactly like what I am looking for. I'll give the OBS-VLC-Gem connection a shot!

I'll let you know, as soon as I make any progress!

Hello

Gem has a vlc plug-in that allows you to get video read by VLC into Gem (see pix_video help file)

Another option in linux (maybe also raspberry pi os) would be to set up a virtual v4l2 device with https://github.com/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback/ then read the video stream with ffmpeg which is capable of writing it to the v4l2device https://github.com/v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback/wiki/FFmpeg and Gem then consider this virtual v4l2 device as a webcam (you have to say to pix_video which /dev/videoXXX it has to consider)

++