Syphon

Syphon is an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames - full frame rate video or stills - with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs.


Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo.
Syphon, 720p mixing from VDMX to Unity 3.0 Beta. A taste of whats to come. Applications are incidental.

Features
Syphon provides an ecosystem for sharing imagery between applications and new media development environments. Syphon is designed to be efficient and will not duplicate resources unnecessarily, keeping your frame rate and best interests in mind.
Hardware acceleration on the GPU - Servers and Clients share video on the graphics card - where it belongs, allowing for HD or larger video at 60 FPS
Alpha-channels - share rendered 3D content and video with masks and keys, allowing compositing to happen easily and naturally.
Out-of-the-box support for Quartz Composer, FreeFrame GL, Max MSP Jitter and Unity Pro
A simple SDK so developers can add Syphon to just about any application

Syphon Implementations
We provide implementations for some of our favorite new media applications.
Quartz Composer: Syphon.plugin (download)
Max MSP Jitter: jit.gl.syphon (download)
FreeFrame GL: Syphon.bundle (download)
Unity 3D Pro: SyphonUnity.bundle (download)

Syphon Apps
We are looking forward to announcing Syphon support in some major applications in the near future. When that happens, we’ll list them here.
Simple Server/Client
A pair of applications to demonstrate Syphon and try out the other implementations
(http://syphon.v002.info/)


Syphon Introduction from vade on Vimeo.
Syphon is a new open source framework for Mac OS X 10.6 that allows users to share frames of video across applications. Sharing happens on the graphics card, and thus is hardware accelerated and very fast. Sharing of HD frames, at full 60 frames per second is more than possible.
Syphon is "opt-in", meaning applications can natively support Syphon frame sharing by linking to our framework and writing some additional code, or by supporting an existing plugin architecture that Syphon has implementations for, such as Quartz Composer, Free Frame GL, or Max5 externals, etc.
Sharing requires no additional applications, and an application can publish multiple distinct frame sources, and receive multiple distinct fram


Syphon for FFGL & Resolume from vade on Vimeo.


Syphon for QC & VDMX from vade on Vimeo.


Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo.
Ray from Vidvox was kind enough to share a hint of upcoming Syphon integration with the latest internal Beta of VDMX.
"Feature-wise, VDMX will have/already has complete and seamless integration with Syphon: any published Syphon servers on your system are automatically made available and can be triggered as if they were files or passed to fx/plugins/other layers/anything via taps. Likewise, you can publish any layer, group, or plugin in VDMX via Syphon and make its contents available to other apps on the same machine."