Five things to give up when running Millumin.

Millumin runs exclusively on the Mac, which brings a lot of video processing power and a few unique things to the software. Once you get a few things dialed in and understand it's limitations and strengths it will be a bulletproof solution for media playback.

EDID

You don't have to tell most professionals about the EDID workarounds for a Mac running Millumin. This is, without a doubt, the most significant hurdle to a worry-free setup. When running a video signal into a Barco E2 or other professional switcher, you can do many things to ensure your EDID shows up correctly. Still, even with best efforts, it can fall to the media server operator to ensure your pixels are right. SwitchResX and other programs that let you customize your output resolution will make your life easier, especially when making custom resolutions for LED walls.

Multi-Output Sync

This big one defines the limit of using Milumin in a live event scenario. You need a different media server solution if a screen needs more pixels than a Mac can push out of a single output. Of course, there are a few workarounds to this limit.

Multi-output adapters: The Thunderbolt standard that most Macs use has enough bandwidth for three 4K60, four 4K30, two 8K30, or one 8K60 screen. Using an adapter that will allow multiple screens from a single USB-C port is a way to sync screens most of the time. One of my favorite adapters is the OWC Thunderbolt Dual DisplayPort Adapter.

External PCIe Enclosures: Putting a PCIe card, like the Blackmagic Design Decklink 8K Pro, in an external enclosure that connects via Thunderbolt is another great way around the limitation of screen sync. This particular card and cards like the AJA KONA 5 have an external sync input that frame locks the outputs together.

8k Splitter Boxes: There are very few examples of these on the market right now, and they are both hard to acquire and prohibitively expensive. However, the Novastar DS80 exemplifies how this limitation may be overcome. The box takes in an 8K signal and spits out four 4K quadrants. Just like the Datapath FX4 works right now with 4k.

HDMI

This is always the first thing I ask when people have connectivity problems in Millumin. HDMI out of OSX is less stable than DisplayPort. Every Mac in the lineup has support for native DisplayPort output over USB-C. Ditch your HDMI adapters, give up trying to come out of the HDMI port, and get some quality USBC to DisplayPort adapters.

GPU Optimized Video Codecs

The last few years have given us some powerful GPUs. However, advances in CPU technology for Windows computers have yet to keep up. Decoding and encoding video with those more powerful graphics engines makes more sense. Mac, however, is built differently at a system level. The CPU and the GPU are combined into a single shared processor with video encoders and decoders built directly into the chip's architecture. Using a codec like HAP or Notch adds needless complexity to the production of show assets and decreases the number of layers of video that you can play simultaneously. The Mac Studio M2 Ultra will hardware-accelerate the encoding and decoding of H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW with two video decode engines and four video encode engines for H.264, HEVC, and four ProRes encode and decode engines. A full-spec Mac Studio M2 Ultra can support up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback - something no other personal computer can do.

Ultra-wide screen playback

Currently, the USBC outputs on a Mac are limited to 6144px wide, with only two exceptions. Every computer Apple sells has from one to eight Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports. Digging deeper, you'll find it's a Thunderbolt 3/USB 4 port on all but the high-end models. Only the MacBook Pro M3 Pro and Max, both the Mac Studio models and the Mac Pro have Thunderbolt 4 ports.

However, this doesn't explain the limitation. It is an imposed limit of the operating system. Any OSX newer than Ventura has this limit. Previous versions of OSX would allow widescreen outputs up to 7680px wide as long as you stayed within the 8.2 million pixels of a 4K signal. So, if you have macOS 12 (Monterey), think long and hard before upgrading your Milumin computers.

The Mac Studio M2 Ultra and Mac Pro don't have this limitation because they can do three 8K outputs out of their Thunderbolt 4 ports.

Few other computers can match the computing power of the Mac in the form factor. Being able to output four 8K outputs and run 22 layers of 8K video simultaneously is not possible with any other system that has a 3.69L volume, but there are cases in which even a cheap PC with a $500.00 GFX card is the clear winner. So, the biggest thing to give up when running any media server or playback solution is the tunnel vision that says my solution is best no matter what.

I'm happy to answer questions, and I'd love feedback.