What's New

June 4th, 2024

With the release of ISAAC 2.4 (Mojave) comes a variety of new features and improvements. Probably the more interesting one for an integration standpoint is the Preview feature. The Preview feature, more precisely the Composition Preview allows users to preview compositions being authored before saving them for further use in the schedule. Although this feature has been primarily designed for Media and generative content servers, its genericity makes it usable for a broader type of integrated systems. An example could be a lighting system which has a 3D simulation rendering capability of light scenes.

Preview relies on 2 elements, a Target and a Panel. The target is a subsystem capable of consuming compositions which can either be the same one that is ensuring the playback of these compositions or another one (for example on a Fleet some Players ensure playback while a dedicated player ensure preview). The Panel, if defined, is where this subsystem outputs the preview (this would be typically a web page), or if a Panel is not defined, it is assumed that the subsystem has a local way to show the preview (a dedicated monitor for example). For those familiar with the way Instant Play operates, the Preview feature also relies on ISAAC heartbeat messages to carry previewPlay and previewStop messages for the subsystem. Details is provided in the new update of the API Guide revision coming with 2.4.

Also coming as part of the 2.4 API Guide revision, although not being a new feature per se, is the guidance on how to optimize the Schedule fetching, making use of the Last-Modified and If-Modified-Since headers when fetching the Schedule. This optimization allows to request the schedule more frequently with minimum performance impacts for both ISAAC and the subsystem, since a 304 (not modified) will be returned if no changes have happened since the schedule last update.