Pd
These are just some notes about how I managed to get Pd to build, with the Gem library, and demonstrate two realtime video streams as described by Vade on the pd mailing list.
I am documenting this because there are many confusing resources in support of pd.
All of the efforts I’ve encountered on the web are valuable. These various initiatives maintain versions of pd for different OS, create additional pd libraries for extra capabilities, and pre-bundle distributions with built-in libraries. However, this creates a thicket for newbies.
The Final Answer
The wellspring for pd, the guy in charge of the pd core, is Miller Puckette. The latest releases of pd code can be found at the less than memorable URL http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html.
This is where I picked up the source for pd v0.39-2. Version 0.39 or above was required for compatibility with my version of Mac OS X (10.4 Tiger). The pd-extended releases were too old and didn’t help.
Pd depends on TclTk for windowing, which is available for the Mac from the TclTkAqua sourceforge site. Version 8.4.9 was the last version which is verified to work with pd. I didn’t try the more recent one.
Building Miller Puckette’s pd v0.39-2 then gave me a minimal installation of pd.
To execute pd, I had to cd into the /bin directory of the pd distribution, because otherwise it can’t find the pd.tk file. So finally I ran
./pd
and it worked, but complained that gem and pmpd weren’t there (because they are not by default part of pd).
N.B. This minimal installation doesn’t have all the libraries built into it that exist in the pd-extended distribution. You have to get them yourself.
The Minimal Extras Required For Video Playback
Gem v0.90 was acquired from the gem sourceforge site. It provides additional capabilities to wire in video and 3d visuals to the pd programming model.
To use Gem, you must drop the pre-built libraries for your platform (mine was called Gem.pd_darwin) into the /extra/ directory inside the pd distribution.
Vade kindly created a demo pd program which would enable dual head rendering of two videos (assuming your video card supports video acceleration on its external video port - they don’t all do this).
The side-roads.
In addition to Miller Puckette’s site, there are also important (and uncoupled?) initiatives to document, bundle and promote pd at http://pd.iem.at/ http://puredata.info/ http://pure-data.sourceforge.net/ http://at.or.at/hans/pd and many more.
A webring has been forged to bind them all http://pd.klingt.org/webring/ but this doesn’t really help to overcome the complexity.
Take a simple example. When following the pd-extended thread of this web, from http://puredata.info/downloads/ I found myself at this page, which seems to suggest (at time of writing) that the latest version is 0.38-0test4HCS4.
The full list of sourceforge downloads for the pure-data sourceforge project is more useful, but also suggests that pd (pure-data) is at version 0.38.1
However, when contacting the pd-list, it turns out that pd itself is well beyond release version 0.39-2, and even pd-extended has tagged cvs branches running beyond 0.39 in cvs .
Attempts to build any versions lower than 0.39 turned out to be fruitless on my OS version, so this was critical information.
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