Curious if Showsync prefers any particular codec when playing back video. I’m used to encoding to DXV or HAP for other softwares. I see a lot of folks using mp4 or what I assume are H264 (or 5?) videos in the examples I’ve see online though. Is this what works best in Showsync?
We don’t maintain any hard rules on what codecs to use, but rather offer a few guidelines. We’d generally recommend working with h264 (since it seems to be the most broadly used), until you may start running into some limitations. It’s good to be aware of those limitations and pros and cons for the various codecs.
When it comes to HAP, Videosync does support it, and it’s particularly useful when you want to use Simpler (or a lot of them). You see, videos encoded with anything other than HAP are loaded into RAM when you load them into Simpler. This is to ensure instantaneous playback when triggering a note. However, H264 is usually heavily compressed, and to load it into RAM it needs to be decompressed, so it can quickly eat up available RAM. HAP is not loaded into RAM and read straight from the hard disk, so that’s makes it a good reason for converting videos to HAP.
Considering the extra hurdle of converting to HAP and the codec not being natively supported by macOS, we rather use this as a last resort.
DXV is specifically for Resolume, so that doesn’t require further elaboration.
For more details on various codecs, consider checking out this page in our Handbook, or let us know if you have any more questions!