ardour - the new digital audio workstation - includes rudimentary support to display video-timelines. - For this to work the video-data needs to be supplied by a 3rd-party application via TCP-socket, hence the name: Image Compositor Socket.
Back in 2004/2005 aniComp from the CMT, Glasgow Animatics-server was supported in Ardour-0.99; but since then
ardour-2.X ICS code has been mostly unmaintained.
I took to code a video-server that implements the ICS protocol to communicate with ardour and manages EDL video-sessions. This wiki page documents information regarding interoperability and interaction with ardour.
ardour-0.99.3 works just fine. However the 2.0-ongoing branch (currently ardour-2.5, svn rev. 3617) introduces video-display regressions that require patching: You can grab split-patches and follow discussion at http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2364 or download a combined patch from here.
ardour enables it's video-capabilities if it can find an executable aniComp in $PATH. Probably the easiest way to accoplish this is to:
sudo ln -s /bin/true /usr/local/bin/aniComp
ardour2 will also need the an additional line in the ardour.menus configuration file:
<menuitem action='aniConnect'/>
I've added it below the “AddTrackBus” entry.
Launch the socket-server, ardour and activate ardour's “connect” menu-entry.
ICS communicates via TCP port 30000. The general syntax is in ASCII text: Every message but the raw-video-data is encoded as Text, integers are represented as decimal values.
NUMBER := <ascii-decimal-integer (3 or 10bytes)> TEXT := <length (3bytes)><data (length bytes)> REPLY := "RT0" | "RT1" COMMAND := <2-byte-command> [2-byte-id]* [TEXT]* [NUMBER]*
there are various 2-byte identifiers for commands, items and attributes (eg. IN: insert, RM: remove, IT: imageframe time axis etc). for a full list see the ardour source:
gtk2_ardour/ardour_image_compositor_socket.h gtk2_ardour/imageframe_socket_handler.cc gtk2_ardour/imageframe_socket_handler.h
If you don't have aniComp and can't wait until sodankyla is deployable, you can connect to ardour using the gnu-tool socket. Here's an annotated example session:
# # $ socket -v -ls 30000 # # load session SAOS019/tmp/a25/a25.ardour # # create new video-track "TTTT" INIT004TTTT # rename "TTTT" to "NAME" MVIT004TTTT004NAME # insert a new marker-track (just testing) INMT005VNAME004NAME # add a new video-scene/group to the video-track INIG004NAME007myscene # add an image to the video-scene # Track Scene Chunk # | | | start duration # | + | + | + | | INII004NAME007myscene004myID00000000000000048000 # # ardour asks: # # "RQID004NAME007myscene004myID066" # | + | + | + | # | | | preferred height # Track Scene Chunk # # # reply - header # Width # | Height # | | SPP # | | | Data len # | | | | RDID00800600300000000000000000000000000000144 # expect "RT1" from ardour. # now send image data - here: 144 bytes 000...000 (repeat)
Note: ardour-0.99.3 expects SPP=4 and RGBA image data. The patched ardour2 can handle RGB24 and RGBA32.