There wouldn't be much of an issue getting the
console companies to adopt a universal
profile. It would greatly reduce their development cost and simplify maintenance. OTOH, the
fixture manufacturers have a tougher time with a universal
profile since their market differentiation is directly tied to the features they offer. Many
LED fixture manufacturers provide a lowest common denominator
profile that matches something like 8-bit
RGB or 8-bit
RGB with an
intensity parameter. Trouble is, somebody always wants to use some extended feature.
The
DMX protocol complicates things quite a
bit too since the limit on addresses per
universe together with the relatively slow transmission speeds means sending a lot of data quickly can't happen. Since a univeral
profile would have to be written to the worst case of every feature at the highest resolution it would very quickly chew up every available
address. If we get an to ethernet-based
protocol, that issue would be alleviated but I don't see that happening any time soon, and not without a great deal of grumbling from people like us with a large investment in
DMX today.
Most
console manufacturers are trying to provide a layer of abstraction to the
bit twiddling needed to manipulate a
fixture. Even with a universal
profile there wouldn't be universal behaviour. Pan and tilt ranges vary, colour mixing is going to be different,
gobo wheels are not going to match,
etc.
The best hope today is some sort of bidirectional communication wherein the
fixture could describe itself to the
console using some agreed upon standard.
RDM tries to do this over existing hardware but it is limited in both the kind and the amount of information it can transmit. Assuming those limitations went away, there would still be issues with the
console being able to handle some new and unsupported feature.
It's a nice goal though.