FOSDEM 2011: MilkyMist Open VJ Platform

On: February 5, 2011
About John Haltiwanger
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The field of VJ (visual jockey) is an increasingly prominent aspect of live performance, especially in the relatively “quiet” physical performance of electronic music. Clubs such as Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam run commercial Windows based VJ software in undynamic loops resembling a software demo as seen in a store.

Today at FOSDEM in Brussels the Fabricatorz libre design team member Sebastian Bourdeauducq presented the MilkyMist free software VJ platform. Powered by a reconfigurable, open source multimedia chip and running equally libre software (not Linux-based but also licensed under the GPL), MilkyMist provides an unprecedented degree of freedom for VJ set design and performance.

Anyone familiar with the evolution of multimedia in FLOSS recognizes that we have progressed a long and bumpy road to have achieved the renaissance we are currently experiencing. Sebastian stressed the end-user nature of MilkyMist. Just because it is fully reprogrammable all the way down to the hardware does not mean you are required to be a hacker to use the system. FLOS enthusiasts will be understandably excites by this broad step forward in multimedia hardware freedom, but VJs may be equally if not more exuberant about a deeply configurable, single-stop solution for performance. The Flickernoise VJ software replicates the popular Milkdrop music visualization system and extends it to incorporate real time video processing and realtime control through interfaces such as MIDI and OSC, all in a tiny form factor

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