Requirements for Compiling, Installing and Running Snowmix.

This page lists the supported platforms as well as the required hardware and software needed to compile, install and run Snowmix.

• Supported Platforms.
• Supported Hardware.
• Required Libraries.
• Optional Libraries.
• List of libraries per platform/distro.

Snowmix is supported on a wide range of Linux distributions and was supported on versions of macOS (OS X). Native MacOS support is planned to be pickup, when access to hardware for testing has been secured.

Snowmix version 0.5.2 release was tested on the following platforms:

• Linux Canonical Ubuntu Desktop and Server amd64/i686/ARMv7 (debian derived).
• Linux Debian amd64 and i686.
• Linux Fedora Workstation amd64 and i686 (RedHat derived).
• Linux Mageia amd64 and i686 (Derived from Mandriva derived from Mandrake (and Conectiva) derived from RedHat).
• Linux Manjaro amd64 and i686 (Arch derived).
• Linux MX Linux amd64 and i686 (debian derived).
• Linux Mint amd64 and i686 (Ubuntu/debian derived).
• Linux OpenSUSE amd64 and i686.

For Snowmix 0.5.1.1, the following OS distributions was also supported, but testing and support for version 0.5.2 and newer has for now been cancelled.

• Linux CentOS amd64 and i686 (Fedora based).
• Linux Chakra amd64 and i686 (Arch Based).

For Snowmix 0.5.1.1, the following macOS (and OS-X) for i686/amd64/x86-64 hardware was supported. Due lack of access to macOS hardware, support is temporarily suspended. That said, you may be able to compile Snowmix for macOS with few or no modifications. If access to hardware for macOS can be provided on a temporary basis, support can be resumed. Feel free to contact author if you can provide access to macOS hardware.

• macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra
• OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion.

MacOS ARM based M1, M2 etc. hardware is currently not tested due to lack of access.

For Snowmix 0.5.1, the following OS distributions was also supported, but testing for version 0.5.1.1 and newer has for now been cancelled.

• FreeBSD PCBSD and TrueOS amd64.
• Linux Linaro ARMv7 (tested version 0.5.0 on ODROID U2)

A version of FreeBSD namely PCBSD/TrueOS was partly supported on Snowmix version 0.5.1, but since TrueOS is no longer maintained and online downloads of updated packages are no longer available, Snowmix support for FreeBSD is for now discontinued.

For Windows, please see the relevant section in the FAQ.

Snowmix is very relaxed with its hardware requirements and it has been tested successfully on a variety of older and newer computers with i386/i686, amd64/x86_64 and ARMv7 compatible processors.

Snowmix code until version 0.5.1 was being developed by the author on an old 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad T61 with 2GB of RAM to ensure that Snowmix can run on a wide range of hardware including older hardware. Newer version are being developed on slightly newer hardware with more cores and RAM.

Although Snowmix itself have very modest hardware requirements, a complete video mixer system with many input pipelines decoding HD,FullHD, 4k or higher video, Snowmix mixing highe resolution video and an output pipeline aggressively encoding high quality low bandwidth video will require a substantial amount of both CPU power and CPU to memory bandwidth.

The author is using Snowmix to produce Live television rocket launches from the Baltic Sea for Copenhagen Suborbitals. The productions are in FullHD 1080p - 1920x1080@30fps with up to 14 camera input and up to 18 audio input on old IBM/Lenovo X3690X5 servers with with two Xeon 2.40G0Hz E7-2840 32nm Westmere CPUs, each with 10 cores (40 threads per server) and 32GB RAM in total although less is required. This type of CPU was released for sale in 2011 so obviously Snowmix can run on older hardware as well as very well on newer hardware. Snowmix only uses a fraction of the CPU time as most CPU time on a complete multi core system goes to decoding video and audio streams for input as well as encoding the mixed audio and video stream for output.

Does this mean that you could build a really great 4k or higher mixer platform on a modern quad or dual Xeon or Ryzen Threadripper server? Heck yeah!.

Snowmix depends on libcairo from CairoGraphics.org and Pango available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows among others. Libcairo is already part of most Linux distributions. Prebuilt binaries are also available for Mac OS X and Windows although Pango on OS X may have to be built using MacPort or Homebrew.

Snowmix also depends on SDL, libPNG and Tcl/Tk which all have multi-platform support including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

For configuring and compiling Snowmix, gcc/g++, make and autotools are necessary.

For scripts and more, usually programs like, bc, nc (netcat), awk and many more standard Un*x tools are expected to be available.

The bootstrap script supplied with Snowmix will offer to check, download and install necessary tools, libraries and needed software for you. This inlcudes checking on bc for most distros.

Snowmix now has support for embedded Python scripting like Snowmix has had support for embedded Tcl scripting for many years. Embedded Python scripting in Snowmix requires libpython3. The bootstrap for Snowmix will offer to download libraries needed if your computer has not already done so. For Snowmix version 0.5.2, embedded Python scripting is alpha code and disabled by default. To enable it please follow the instructions for adding embedded Python support to Snowmix.

Snowmix has support for hardware accelerated OpenGL 3D scripting and features. Depending on distro and platform this requires som libraries typical named some combination of MESA, OS, GL, X11, GLU and more. There is also support for OpenGL in pure softwatware, but that is slow. Libraries for OpenGL support is included in the listing for supported platforms/distros below. Instructions on how to enable OpenGL support in Snowmix is described here.

Snowmix uses a shared memory model for efficiently inputting to and outputting video from Snowmix. The shared memory model is compliant with GStreamer shmsink and shmsrc so Gstreamer is recommended as required software too. All the scripts for inputting and outputting audio and video to and from Snowmix uses Gstreamer.

Snowmix bootstrap scripts, configure scripts and more has been tested in a bash shell. It is recommended to run bootsrap and compilation/make in a bash shell and remeber to set the environmenr variable SNOWMIX as mentioned many times in the documentation and in the text printed to the terminal running the bootstrap script. Other shells may work, but they are not tested here.

The table below list the packages needed to be installed for Snowmix to compile, run and test on each supported platform. Snowmix's boostrap script will detect platform and offer to install missing packages.

Previously supported or support currently on hold