Feature Request: ArtNet 4

DMX is 30 years old, it doesn’t mean it’s still not relevant today.

We have an ANSI standard for DMX over the Ethernet, which is sACN. sACN has been supported in Eos since day 1 and offers many advantages over Art-Net. Art-Net 4 doesn’t add anything which sACN doesn’t already have, indeed it actually adds support for managing sACN devices, so you can use Art-Net 4 for management and sACN for control data.

RDMnet is in the final stages of ratification which means we have all the management capabilities plus way more from another ANSI industry standard. 

There’s no real compelling reason for Art-Net 4 support in Eos. 

I agree, sACN is the better protocol. But it doesn't change the fact that many devices only accept ArtNet. In our case (and as discussed in the facebook group earlier), we would like to control digidots over wifi, which simply ins't possible because of the mass of traffic ArtNet 1 produces. It could be reduced by unicast or multicast in ArtNet 4.

So yeah, ArtNet does not add anything to sACN (well, in fact it does at the moment -> RDM), but ArtNet 4 does to ArtNet 1.

ArtNet is an industry standard, so for me it is hardly understandable, why ETC doesn't want to include the latest version.

I agree, sACN is the better protocol. But it doesn't change the fact that many devices only accept ArtNet. In our case (and as discussed in the facebook group earlier), we would like to control digidots over wifi, which simply ins't possible because of the mass of traffic ArtNet 1 produces. It could be reduced by unicast or multicast in ArtNet 4.

So yeah, ArtNet does not add anything to sACN (well, in fact it does at the moment -> RDM), but ArtNet 4 does to ArtNet 1.

ArtNet is an industry standard, so for me it is hardly understandable, why ETC doesn't want to include the latest version.

I appreciate your position. The question is whether there is enough demand for ETC to put in the engineering to add support. Unicast adds quite a big overhead because there needs to be discovery and/or a device patching mechanism. Art-Net has no support for multicast, even in version 4.

Art-Net may be widely used, but it’s not a standard, it’s a protocol which has been made publicly available. There’s a big difference. Eos still doesn’t support the 2016 or 2018 versions of sACN, and it is Eos’ primary control protocol.

I’ve had a look at your Facebook post, and I actually think you’ll struggle significantly more with latency over WiFi than with bandwidth limitations. Remember any streaming protocol requires timely delivery, and WiFi simply isn’t optimised for that. I’m not sure where you got your 400Kbps figure. An ArtDmx packet is 523 bytes maximum, which when changing constantly at 40fps is 167Kbps.