Firstly, thank you to Andrei for creating this amazing toolset and making it open source for everyone to be able to check out!
I found some conflicting, outdated, and confusing info regarding how to get everything working. Maybe that is my problem and I just didn’t quite grok everything properly. In any case, I thought maybe it would be helpful if I wrote up some details on what I’ve discovered over the last couple of days of trying to get everything working on a fresh install, on a Windows (10) PC that has never had any of this stuff installed on it previously.
The Stuff You Need To Download
Video Synthesis Desktop current version
Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition
K-Lite Codec Pack
NDI Tools for Windows
The Stuff You Need To Do
Run the VS2019 installer, and be sure to click the box for installing the C++ tools. This is the only part of VS2019 you need to install. This is the box that is titled “Desktop development with C++”
Unzip the vws_2_718_winlin.rar file
Install the k-lite codec pack.
Install the NDI tools
Run the projectGenerator.exe program within the projectGenerator-vs folder in your extracted vws package
Select the folder where you just expanded vws to:
(note, this is a point of confusion with a lot of the existing documentation. You do not need to download OpenFrameworks – it exists already inside the vws bundle you have downloaded. This tool wants you to select the vws folder! the one that has addons, apps, docs, examples etc inside it)
click Import
One by one, click each folder within vws_2_718_winlin → myapps, click select folder, and then click Update
To load one of the tools, double click the .vcxproj file inside the myapps\{whichever project}\ folder
This will open VS2019. When the dialog comes up asking you to “retarget” the project, accept it and click OK.
Run NDI
If you want to capture video from VLC, open “NDI for VLC”. Within VLC, go to the Tools menu, preferences, then click on Video. Change the “Output” dropbox to “NDI video output”.
Now when you play a video in VLC you will not see anything other than a black screen inside the player.
Open NDI Webcam
Click the gear icon on Video 1
You should be able to find VLC within the menu, under the name of your PC
This now has VLC’s output routed via NDI Webcam 1.
You can now run your tool (etc video waaaves) in VS2019, and make sure that your device IDs are correctly assigned (eg, check that device 0 really is webcam video 1)
At this point, you can play video in VLC and it should be available within cam1 in video waaaves (or other tool).
Hopefully, this is helpful for someone. I sure went through some chaos trying to get everything working here in late 2023 – the general environment has changed since a bunch of the instructions were first written and things didn’t quite line up anymore.