Quartz Composer is a graph of filers that you can interconnect in a graphical interface. You use it to create visual filters or generators. iTunes was using Quartz composer files .qtz for some of his music visualizers.
Quartz Composer is GPU accelerated thanks to its use of the Quartz API.
It was very popular with artists because of the creative freedom it gave when composing the filters. You did not need to be a developer to create a filter, thanks to the editing application.
Quartz Composer is now deprecated and dying in slow and anonymous death.
XQuartz is a windowing system accelerated with Quartz. The X system was not invented by Apple but very popular on top of Unix.
I tried several things but what got the interest of my daughter(10) is code.org
She also uses it at school, and she regularly enjoys working with it on her own.
Because she seems to go more toward the graphical creative side, I made her work on the logo of a personal project I work on at the moment, and she did enjoy it a lot.
Sometimes I ask her to edit some c++ code I work on and see how the result is when running the code from Xcode; we have a lot of fun doing that!
I use FFmpeg for many years, and I did wonder many times why isn't there a CLI that would be simpler to use but still useful for most tasks.
To my knowledge, no project succeeded in doing that. It's not difficult to code a simple reader and a basic encoder, but then you have many cases not supported correctly, as you wrote.
As a developer of VJ applications for more than 25 years, it deeply resonates with me.
I will wait to be able to create an account with my email rather than using google to play with it.
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I watched the 4 example videos. While impressive, the first one has so much flickering that I had to stop watching it. The second example is perfect, and you feel very well the connection to music. The third one got me lost; I am a big fan of ambient and cosmic music, but the result did not seem connected. The fourth one is much better, and you perceive the waves of the musical input very nicely.
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While using a very different technological approach, the three videos from the right side have a lot in common with the results of Shadertoy.
Many music videos on YouTube are just a static picture; there is an excellent market for your idea. Maybe try to have more examples based on what you see prevalent on YouTube.
It's true that if you simply use it on it's simple form such as "ffmpeg -i in.mp4 out.mov" the default bitrate will favour creating small files that will have artefacts, as soon as you set the right option you get very nice results.
Not sure, because the Apple II was easy to copy and it was very popular to buy a Pear computer without roms and just insert the copy of the EPROMs to have a full functional Apple II at a bargain price.
One example is Parallels Desktop, they constantly mail me to upgrade but there is no information what system version they run on. So I downloaded the installer and just launched it. The installer did delete my previous version without asking any question and I was just left with the option to buy the upgrade...
I had to restore a backup to find back my working version. Not sure sure if there are as many extreme examples: an installer that deletes the previous version, remove a valid perpetual license, without asking!
For me having visuals nicely synchronised to the music is adding a lot.
Now that you have a nice custom tools to produce video you should build on it and produce more of them. You have a fan here!