Le Biniou is made of a set of plugins (nearly one hundred), that produce various graphic effects, depending on a source input (usually, your soundcard).
There are several types of plugins:
These plugins can be selected and organized in a particular order, forming "sequences".
Sequences can be created by the user (in the interactive mode), or by Le Biniou's Artificial Intelligence (in the automatic mode).
Le Biniou has an integrated On Screen Display (OSD), that shows you what's going on, and acts as a User Interface to select, organize or reorder plugins when you're in the interactive mode.
By default, Le Biniou starts in automatic mode, without OSD.
Le Biniou can randomly pick between many different colormaps and background images, allowing evolving rendering effects.
There are also three "auto-modes", that will randomly change the current sequence between user-defined and/or Le Biniou-generated ones.
Keyboard controls will be shown like this: "Hit the [SPACE] key".
Note: This is just a quickstart guide, for a full list of keyboard controls, please refer to the man page:
Le Biniou can be started by:
Using the command line, you can set specific options, like the display mode (window size, full-screen, etc.), the input source to use, which On Screen Display mode to activate, and more.
Please refer to the "Command line options" section for more informations.
Options can also be set with a user-defined configuration file.
Note: You can create a shortlink to your ~/.lebiniou folder, so it is easily accessible:
When started, Le Biniou will create a new sequence regularly using it's Artificial Intelligence engine. Stop this mode by hitting [ESCAPE].
If the OSD is activated, a progress bar on the right will show you the time remaining until Le Biniou creates a new sequence.
At some point, you may want to create your own sequences. We will show you how to do this with a complete example.
To create new sequences, it is recommended to set the OSD in full mode (so that you can see the sequence, the plugin list and their description), and of course to turn Automatic Mode off (using [ESCAPE]).
To start from the begining, use [Shift-z] to remove all the plugins, and [n] to clear the screen.
Note: In the top-left part of the OSD, the sequence will have the name "(none)".
You can save your newly created sequence using [Ctrl-s]. From now on, the sequence will have a name (the timestamp you saved it), for example: "1300821622". It will be saved in your "~/.lebiniou/sequences/" folder under the name "1300821622.xml". Later, you can rename this file to a suitable name, e.g. "My cool sequence.xml". This new name will be displayed in the OSD.
You can overwrite an existing sequence using [Ctrl-u] (the name will not be changed).
When you have several sequences, you can cycle through them using [Shift-LEFT] and [Shift-RIGHT], pick one at random using [BACKSPACE], and use them in the Automatic Mode. Use [Ctrl-p] to select the most recent sequence.
You can change the plugins order in the sequence:
Example sequences are available, install them by issuing the following command in your home directory:
Some plugins don't propagate their result to the next plugins, to avoid video-feedback. These are known as "lens plugins":
Some plugins (e.g.: cth_[xy]roller, taquin) give nice results when allowing them to video-feedback.
You can switch the "lens mode" on/off on any plugin with [Shift-l].
You can control how a plugin effects are melt with the previous one by controlling it's "layer mode" (think of merging layers in the GIMP):
There are 6 layer modes available:
Select the next layer mode using [Shift-y] or reset to it's default using [Alt-y]
You can permanently set options in a configuration file (~/.lebiniourc), install this file by issuing the following command:
This file is self-documented, and comes with suitable default values.
Images must be in PNG format, without comments (see below for how to strip them).
Images are organized as "themes", that is, by directory.
Put your images under ~/.lebiniou/images/<my_theme_name>.
Then start, using the "-t" switch with your theme name, prefixed with a "~":
Or a comma-separated list of themes:
Use the images from lebiniou-data package by removing the leading "~":
You can also set this in your ~/.lebiniourc configuration file. For example:
[Engine]
Themes = biniou,~theme1,~theme2Assuming you have the "convert" command (from the ImageMagick package):
You can bind sequences, colormaps and images to the function keys to organize and quickly activate them. You are given 12 "banksets", each bankset contains 12 "banks" that can be mapped to sequences/colormaps/images.
Note: Banks are not saved to disk until you use [Ctrl-b].
Note: They are stored in your "~/.lebiniou/banks.xml" file.
Some rarely used options can be configured through environment variables:
Example:
Example:
Some plugins (e.g.: the "galaxy" plugin) operate in 3D.
Recording as videos is not (yet) supported: the easiest way to do this would be to use some kind of screen-recorder (for example, vokoscreen).
Nevertheless, you can dump each frame to disk, so that you can reassemble them to a video using e.g. ffmpeg, with the "diskwriter" output plugin. This plugin will basically dump every frame in your "~/.lebiniou/screenshots/" folder.
Note: Dumping frames to disk may slow down your system. To avoid this, put the screenshots folder on a SSD drive, or a RAM-disk.