Feature Request: Delay

[RonaldBeal]

First, I would like to say this is an impressive piece of work... Great job.
We had an unusual request from a client. They were outputting sACN from a GrandMA3 to a lighting rig, and a visualizer (Depence 4.)
because of the latency of the visualizer, it lagged the real rig my a noticeable amount. Their request was for us to delay the live rig universes so that both systems were in sync....

We were in the process of setting up a linux machine to run TC Qdisk to delay select multicast traffic, but the client gave up on the idea before we were able to test it.

Presumably you could FIFO buffer sACN and Art-Net streams by an adjustable amount to allow delay. Available ram and number of universes would determine max delay allowed.

I know it is a big task, but figured it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Thanks again for all the hard work.

[fiverecords]

Hi Ronald,
Thanks for the kind words and for the use case — it’s a good one and it pushed me to add the feature properly.
Per-output transmit delay will be in v1.10.1, configurable per output in the engine editor (range 0–5000 ms, default off). So in your visualizer scenario you’d set the rig output’s delay to match Depence’s pipeline latency and the two systems land on the audience at the same instant. A single engine with two outputs (one to the rig, one to the visualizer) can split the delay between them however the show needs.
Implementation notes that might matter for your setup:
• Off = zero overhead. When delay is 0 (the default for every output), the dispatch path short-circuits with no buffer allocated, no timer, no nothing — the output is bit-identical to the current code. The rest of the rig that doesn’t need delay pays nothing.
• Each delayed output uses ~110 KB at the 5 s cap (44 Hz × 512 B × ~220 frames in flight), which is trivial.
Will close this as resolved once v1.10.1 is published. Thanks again for the report.

[fiverecords]

The V1.10.1 version is already released, try it when you can.