So I reached out to R&D staff, both past and present, from some of the top DMX controllable media server manufacturers in order to find out the hows and whys of Mac vs. PC. Their responses reflect the knowledge that has accrued over the years among those involved in digital media R&D.
Media servers adopting the Mac platform include the Catalyst, developed by Richard Bleasdale, and PRG’s Mbox EXtreme.
Catalyst
For Bleasdale, the decision to build the Catalyst on the Mac platform back in 2001 was very much subjective. “I prefer to start with creative, not technical things.” Bleasdale says. “I’m just trying to help people solve really simple but common show problems the best way I can.” So it was practical that he would use his Mac-based show-control SAMSC software as the foundation for Catalyst.
Bleasdale’s approach has always been to work with end users, listen to requests for features and find ways to solve problems that arise in the field, as well as to use his own experiences as a film maker and engineer to create a product that crosses boundaries.
“I’m not really a lighting and video designer,” he adds. “I have a filmmaking and engineering technology background — more a filmmaker. So I’m actually concerned with the meaning of images and imagery — what a visual idea represents.”
As a result of his work, he has helped set the stage for the integration of filmmaking ideas into the world of live entertainment.
“The shows I have been involved with recently have really pushed video design, creatively — much closer to what filmmakers do. Video design on theatrical shows these days is much more like animated scenic design…not just splodge, or lighting patterns through the air.
Although there’s much discussion these days about the convergence of lighting and video, Bleasdale begs to differ. “There isn’t a convergence between lighting and video — they are entirely separate art forms, totally different aesthetic concerns. There is a divergence going on right now — not a convergence.”
Bleasdale opted for the Mac platform over the PC when he started developing media server software in 1992 because, by comparison, PCs were “horrible — almost impossible to work with.” On the Mac side, by contrast, there were “major GUI breakthroughs” as early as 1987.
Mbox EXtreme
Also on the Mac side is PRG’s Mbox EXtreme, born through the merger of companies developing two different media servers, the Mbox and Virtuoso EX1.
“It goes back farther than Mbox — we originally chose the Mac for the Virtuoso system because of better integrated support for things like multiple monitors and 3D rendering from the OS at the time,” says PRG engineering manager and chief software developer Charles Reese.
“That is less of an issue now, although Mbox EXtreme takes advantage of several unique features of OS X, such as the Core Image framework that allows us to easily write plugins to create image effects that run directly on the graphics card.
“Other important factors were our development experience on the platform, and also the big endian/little endian data representation issue between our embedded processors and a PC,” Reese continues, referring to differences in data representation at the hardware level of the two platforms at the time.
“The original EX1 was a Windows/PC product,” Reese continues. “Once we merged the feature set with Mbox to create Mbox EXtreme, we elected to go with Mac platform, mainly due to the Core Image framework and the movie playback capabilities of the Quicktime library, which was one of the key strengths of the Mbox product.
“These days you will find successful products on both platforms, so while there are pros and cons either way, both are viable,” Reese concludes.
Media servers that were developed on a PC operating system platform include High End Systems’ Axon, Green Hippo’s Hippotizer and Martin Professional’s Maxedia.
Axon
“There are many reasons to use one platform versus another,” says Scott Blair, a software engineer who had been part of the R&D team at High End Systems, working on the Axon media server’s development. A key factor is simply which platform the developers are most experienced with and comfortable with, he notes.
Other key factors pushing Axon to the PC side: “When we started on DL.2, we knew we needed to embed the server into the fixture. At that point, Catalyst was a well-established HES product, but Apple doesn’t sell just the guts or provide any means to build a truly embedded product. Buying a full Mac and disassembling it and trying to then shove the guts into a fixture didn’t really make sense.
“Going with Windows gave us the option of using XP Embedded, which allowed us a create a locked-down O/S that would be immune to random power events corrupting the O/S and eliminated the ability for users to make changes to O/S settings that would affect the reliability or system performance,” Blair adds.
Also, the PC platform offered a “wider range of hardware options giving us the ability to provide much better performance for the price,” Blair adds. Finally, “in our case, we were leveraging a lot of rapid development features such as DirectX for media manipulation and .Net for CMA communication to the servers.”
Maxedia
Similar factors also kept Martin’s Maxedia in the PC camp. “Windows supports DirectX, which allows us to use all the features designed for video games for the media server,” notes Matthias Hinrichs,?Martin’s product manager, lighting and media control. “Development in Direct X is faster than using Open GL, in our opinion.
“Windows supports embedded industrial devices and customized operating systems,” Hinrichs adds. “Apple does not offer embedded development support at all, and we could not resell the Mac OS without major hurdles and could not build custom Mac systems as we can do with Windows components.
In addition, Hinrichs notes a “much larger choice of hardware, especially graphics cards in the Windows platform, at lower costs” and also “large support for third-party hardware like peripherals, touchscreens, etc.
“We wanted to have a unified platform for our development and our console is also done in Windows Embedded. We cannot build a console with Apple motherboards, as there are no separate components available for them, and they do not offer an embedded product line with extended life cycles.”
Hippotizer
Nigel Sadler, Green Hippo’s head of special projects, says the company also saw advantages to DirectX as the key “backbone” technology for developing Hippotizer media servers instead of OpenGL.
“OpenGL can be used on Mac or PC or in fact any platform, whilst DirectX is a Microsoft technology that can only be used on a Windows platform. Performance-wise there is very little [difference] between the two platforms — they keep passing each other in this respect ,and whilst the Mac hardware is very nice and well built, you cannot change it, and [Mac hardware] was never designed to be toured in a rack on a rock ‘n’ roll tour.
“Both technologies have gone though many versions in their lifetime, but at the point that the first version of the Hippotizer Engine was written, the DirectX toolkit was far more powerful than OpenGL on the PC platform. With this in mind, the first Hippotizer Engine, written over 12 years ago, was written in DirectX,” Sadler notes.
“The current Hippotizer engine is also
DirectX, so this is one of the main reasons that we have not moved to the Mac platform. We would have to re-write 10 years of core engine programming — basically starting from scratch.
“But probably a bigger reason for sticking with the Windows platform is that the programming language required for programming on a Mac platform is not a very popular language.”
Whenever a skill becomes rare, he adds, “it becomes expensive, so keeping up the programming team is made much harder.”
Sadler contends that choosing a side and sticking with it has its advantages. “If you want to get the maximum performance out of your software, you have to opt for one or the other, as creating cross platform applications will mean that you always have to give and take somewhere.”
MediaMaster
But even that position can be open to debate. For its MediaMaster, ArKaos opted for the cross-platform programming route.
“Cross-platform programming means that, when you write some computer code, you design it to run on many operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux,” says Marco Hinic, ArKaos engine architect and CEO.
“At ArKaos, we wanted to take this one step further, because you can create cross-platform software, but it will still be dependent on the platform specificity.
“One important example in our case is video file formats compatibility,” Hinic continues. “We wanted the same content to be accepted across all the systems we are running. We needed to license the codecs needed,” Hinic adds, “and have them supported right inside the application.”
The advantages of designing code to “give the same user experience across all operating systems,” Hinic suggests, aren’t always trivial. “Just on Windows, it is impossible to have a video loop that will play on a freshly-installed version of Windows XP, Vista and 7,” he notes.
Hinic acknowledges that the cross-platform route “made our lives much more complicated,” but adds that those extra steps in development are worth it if it can save the user the need, for example, to have to install specific drivers or extensions before they can start running the software.
“When you are making graphical compositions, blending visuals, applying effects, you need to use the graphical processor (GPU),” Hinic continues. While OpenGL might seem the logical choice for graphic processing — it’s supported on all platforms — Hinic maintains that “OpenGL is not a first-class citizen on Windows.” As a result, ArKaos opted to use OpenGL on the Mac, and DirectX on Windows, “because it’s a Microsoft-native technology.”
Summing Up
Software developers aren’t the only ones facing the PC/Mac crossroads. In short, Macs are known to be very user-friendly, more secure and stable, but upgradeability is limited and the OS can not be used on any other hardware than a Mac.
PCs, on the other hand, can be purpose-built, and they have more upgradeability via graphics cards, RAM and other hardware, thus making them great for gaming. However, certain OS versions can be unreliable and are more susceptible to viruses than Macs.
So, which one will you choose?
Vickie Claiborne extends her gratitude to all who helped provide insights for this column, including everyone mentioned, and also Paul Pelletier and Jim Bornhorst.
