Media
Introduction
A media is any piece of content that can be placed on a Timeline or a Board. All media live in the Media List of the Content window, and all of them behave the same way once they are in a cue: they can be positioned, scaled, deformed, faded, effected, captured in a TextureArea, and sent to any output — whatever their type.
Media come in three families:
- File-based media: a video, an image, a sound file, a subtitle file... The file is uploaded to the Media Servers at Ctrl-O, and played back from their local disk.
- Live inputs: the content comes from outside Onlyview, in real time — an SDI signal, an NDI stream, a Spout texture, a generative engine.
- Generated media: Onlyview itself produces the image — text, countdown, softedge, TextureArea.
Live inputs and generative content have one shared constraint: because every Media Server renders its own part of the stage independently, the source must behave identically on all of them, or the image will not match from one server to the next. Particle systems, randomness and anything time-dependent are the usual causes of desync.
Supported media types
Movies: h.264, h.265, HAP (and HAP Alpha, HAP Q, HAP Q Alpha), NotchLC, ProRes (all variants), VP8, VP9, AV1 — in mp4, mov, mkv, avi, mxf, webm, wmv or mpv containers. Plus image sequences. MPEG-2 is no longer supported.
Images: TGA, PNG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, GIF, TIFF, XPM, PSD/PSB (with independent layers)
Sound: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, OGG — see Audio media
Streaming: SDI (using Decklink cards), NDI
Generative content: Notch, Spout (for Unreal Engine / Unity / other), TouchEngine, Unreal nDisplay
Generated by Onlyview: TextureArea, Text, Countdown, Softedge, Subtitles
Other: DMX recording (.ovdmx), 3D scenes and assets (.ov3d, .fbx)
In this section
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Movies | Containers, codecs, the hardware decoder, image sequences |
| TextureArea | Capturing a part of the stage and reusing it as a media |
| Audio | Sound media, and containers with multiple audio streams |
| Decklink SDI input | Live SDI/HDMI input through Decklink cards |
| NDI | Receiving an NDI stream over IP |
| Spout | Sharing a GPU texture with a third-party application |
| Notch | Playing a Notch block (.dfxdll) |
| TouchEngine | Playing a TouchDesigner project (.tox) |
| Unreal (nDisplay) | Driving Unreal Engine in nDisplay |
| Softedge | Procedural blending gradient |
| Subtitles | .srt files and embedded subtitle streams |
| Text | Simple editable text media |
| Countdown | Clock counting down to another cue |
| DMX Recording | Recording and replaying a DMX show as a media |
Note that outputs are the other end of the pipeline: how the rendered stage leaves the Media Servers (GPU, Decklink, NDI, Spout, SMPTE 2110, audio, pixelmapping) is covered in Outputs.