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News:

May 3, 2002:
I need to update more frequently. I have made improvements to PythonTheater (the most creatively named project in existance) and will package it here soon. xine and mplayer both have made huge strides, so that may help. Despite their progress, avifile continues to be the most robust avi playback solution, so I will continue work on pythontheater. I graduate soon and will hopefully have more time. Things I'm looking at for the future is potentially moving to ffmpeg for mpeg playback, and dvd playback, which would require a different approach to the interface. Frankly, I like ogle for dvd playback and so dvd support is low on my todo list. The top of my list is subtitle support (well, next to bugfixing). So to the small, but highly appreciative *Theater user base, don't worry, I'll have something better along soon.

November 17, 2001:
Well, I have released 0.5.2 of PythonTheater, available on the Downloads page. The big thing: embedded movie playback, as well as some nickel and dime stuff. Python CFLAGS are more properly figured out, Doublesize behaves a bit more predictably in certain circumstances. Try it out, it's *great*.

November 4, 2001:
I have reasonably polished up my PythonTheater project, and lo, it is available for download. I have been able to acheive through this project a degree of consistency, stability, and usability unparallelled in my Xtheater work. While taking some lessons learned from Xtheater development and starting from scratch, along with some conveniences available through python, I have gotten together a pretty solid player (in my experience) in a remarkably short amount of time. Could have been released days ago, but this time I've been more careful about testing and being very careful about fixing my bugs and working around bugs in my support libraries. In addition to requiring smpeg and avifile, like before, this, naturally requires python, and pygtk. If you want something better than Xtheater, this is very much worth a try, though it requires a CVS release of avifile, as 1.0.0-pre1 does. It lacks VCD and network stream support, but that should be addded before too long, just wanted to get the basics done and released for all to see.

October 31, 2001:
Still around. Kinda disappointed by the MPlayer gui, feels so much less cool than it looked in the screeshots. Oh well, still a fine piece of work, but I'll continue working on Xtheater and related projects. Avifile 0.6 is nearing release, and at that time, 1.0 will most likely be released. On a side note, I have begun working on the "next thing", another complete media player rewrite. Xtheater has some really annoying bugs that I'm not sure I feel like fixing. The architecture has grown really ugly, and the price for using plugins has been reduced stability and no benefit that could not be acheived in other ways. Since there aren't exactly a huge line of plugin writers for Xtheater, my future players for now will *not* use plugins. I began what might become the next generation of Xtheater in C++ that keeps things simpler while providing all the same options. That has been put on hold for now in favor of a different media player, an unnamed one based on Python that has a very strong resemblance to Xtheater :) It already plays avi and mpg, with seek and all those goodies, as well as drag and drop, and unlike Xtheater has no problems with opening different or same types of files consecutively. I hope to have a nice playlist editor and support built in by 1.0 this time, as well as maybe some other features. It will require avifile 0.6, smpeg, sdl, PyGTK, and ROX-Lib. It also will inculde some code taken from the pygame distribution.

August 27, 2001:
Finally released a preview version of 1.0. I may make a few changes between now and 1.0.0, but I am primarily holding off on an official release until avifile officially releases 0.6.0. I will focus primarily on bugfixes for now, and when I got things working pretty good without crashing and avifile is released, I'll release 1.0.0 and begin an interesting overhaul of the project that will incorporate some much needed functionaility.

August 23, 2001:
Xtheater CVS is still close to what my next release will be like. Mainly I'm waiting for avifile to release 0.6, so I no longer would have to fear the API changes. On a tangent note, in CVS XFree86 the YUY2 and UYVY XVideo bugs are fixed, and so now Xtheater and other XVideo programs won't crash the X server on a 3Dfx card. Very good news, since I have a Voodoo3 to develop on :)

July 6, 2001:
Did quite a bit of CVS work, and will now say that it is reliable enough to consider seriously using. It is up to date with the avifile CVS. The avi playback bugs that have been apparent in CVS are mostly resolved, and maximizing and resizing are much more reliable. I also added a doublesize feature to the wm plugin. After I more fully flesh out the new and improved wm plugin, I'll probably call it a pre-release, and will hopefully be ready for release by the time avifile 0.60 is released. The CVS is worth looking into, especially if you have XVideo support or like to play AVIs a lot.

June 29, 2001:
Decided to revamp the web site a little, taking out JavaScript and most images and instead using CSS and frames. Hopefully things are a bit faster and easier to navigate.

June 28, 2001:
Job stuff has caught up with me, and I need to go back to Xtheater stuff soon. After getting what I have working and in sync with the avifile tree again, I'll make a pre-release. At that point I should have all the features I want for the next version in place, and mostly be waiting on avifile to settle down. On a side note, if you are an employer seeking a computer person, I'm interested in finding a position. I should have my degree next May, but can work at least part time now. If interested, look at my resume and contact me.

June 10, 2001:
Things in CVS seem pretty stable now, the AVI/ASF/WMV stuff still is what I hope is temporary, needs the extra features of avifile that are not implemented yet. I have tested the drag and drop further and really make huge cleanups in the mpeg playback. Yesterday I tried the file manager ROX seriously and now Xtheater CVS can work as an application directory under it. For those who have not tried it, I strongly recommend ROX as a file manager/environment. It is a lot faster than Any comparably featured file manager, and is extraordinarily intuitive. The way of dealing with application directories has great potential if adopted on a large scale. Very clean idea. As mentioned earlier, Xtheater now has the capability to work as a relocatable application directory, in addition to a standard install.

June 3, 2001:
Decided to take some time out to work on a user guide for CVS Xtheater. It can be found here. If you use avifile 0.6 CVS or don't care about AVI/ASF too much, I recommend checking out cvs now. It has some nice improvements, especially with MPG. The AVI/ASF playback now can scale and fullscreen better, but not the way I like as much. I'm waiting on more features of avifile to come to realization. The MPG/VCD playback now has much more complete fullscreen options with XVideo support and all. Read the user guide about the MPG/VCD plugin here. I'll continue working on CVS, and I don't think anyone will be disappointed with what they get...

May 30, 2001:
As of last night, the CVS should be in sync with avifile-0.6 cvs. It's not pretty, and needs lots of polishing, but if you want to give it a try you can. It currently uses the IAviPlayer2 class for rendering, and as soon as I can get it to accept my custom rendering, I'll switch to that, and maybe leave the IAviPlayer2 method as an option who really think my renderer will be bad. I promise I will only default to my custom renderer if it is as good as my mpeg renderer, not like before where the avi playback was so extremely limited (i.e. no scaling at all). There are just a few oddities about the way the IAviPlayer2 class handles things that I want to change. In particular I want to make it more consistant witht he way I draw MPG and VCD. Keep in mind that if you use CVS, it is in a constant state of flux and is not guaranteed to work very well at all. I use it exclusively myself, so I try to keep it in pretty good working condition. Also, Sourceforge changed the way it handled capital letters *again*, so the CVSROOT changed too, change is refelcted in the cvspage.

May 29, 2001:
Been a long time since my last update. I'm busily working on Xtheater once again now that I've found a little free time. For those encountering a black screen except while trying to move video, and you are running XFree86 with XVideo extensions, I have a patch that will likely fix the problem. In addition, when you resize your window, it will use hardware scaling and filtering through XVideo if available. The patch is on the downloads page.
I have been working some on getting the CVS wm plugin in sync with avifile CVS as well as enhancing the plugin with XVideo stuff. I have done significant nice things to the smpeg plugin in the way of fullscreen configuration and XVideo support. I am also making some general enhancements to little UI oddities that have annoyed ome people in Xtheater.I'll commit the changes to CVS later today that I have done.

February 19, 2001
Xtheater 0.9.2 is out, fixes DPMSdisable problems for some XFree86 3.3.x users. Also improves the seekbar behavior significantly, and fixes a few memory leaks aswell. Try it out. January 19, 2001
I have had a problem and have lost all Xtheater-related email, so if you have an unresolved problem, please ask me again, I'm sorry. On a better note, I have had a bit of breathing time so I have starting working on CVS again. I have incorporated some patches from John Thacker to make things run a bit smoother in general. Also, the DPMS stuff seemed to break things badly under versions of XFree older than 4.0, so I have removed the stuff for anyone not running a newer revision of X. Most people won't miss it, and if you really want it, fix the build to work properly or upgrade to XFree 4.0.1 or 4.0.2.

January 8, 2001
Xtheater 0.9.1 has been officially release, and more improvements will come to CVS quite soon. I have packaged a more recent version of libavilplay, but avifile has progressed suffciently so that I no longer feel that I need to make a separate package, so I will not post an updated 0.53 or 0.53.1 for people. To make avifile build like my package did:
./configure --enable-qt=no --with-win32-path=/usr/local/Xtheater/win32 --enable-sdl --enable-quiet
I will put this in the install instructions.

December 18, 2000
The cvs link above is updated to point to a correct page. I did a bit of work to CVS over the weekend, making it a more proper CVS repository. On top of that, I fixed a few things. For one, updates for avifile 0.51 have been made. If you have this installed, then CVS Xtheater should work for you. Also, a bug where returning from fullscreen could cause the keyboard and mouse to become unresponsive has been fixed, and a similar bug that under some circumstances would prevent the program from going into fullscreen has been fixed. Also, a bug where returning from fullscreen could cause playback to restart from the beginning has been fixed.

December 15, 20000
I have been informed that there is a big mistake in the cvs info that sourceforge supplies. Sourceforge seems to have issues with capital letters. the CVSROOT is *actually* as follows:
:pserver:anonymous@cvs.Xtheater.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/Xtheater

New versions of avifile and smpeg are released, I will make modifications to avifile and package it here soon, smpeg should be a safe upgrade.

December 8, 2000
Xtheater code is now in CVS. There have been two code checkins since 0.9.0.1, mostly autoconf/automake improvements, but one bug regarding video problems when changing the video display is addressed. I will try to keep the changelog on the web in sync with CVS changes so you can get an idea where CVS version stands between releases.

December 6, 2000
WHOOPS, two big glaring bugs in 0.9.0, strongly recommended to patch it with this This should, on average, cut cpu usage by over 50%, and make compilation under non-linux os work..
With the release of Xtheater 0.9.0, I am beginning the development series that will result in 1.0.0. Many many new and needed changes, and with the exception of somewhat flaky GL support, the release seems relatively stable. Since the GL support is an option (disabled by default), it should be worth a shot. Note that the default install dir is now /usr/local/Xtheater instead of /usr/local/lib/Xtheater. I have also posted a libaviplay tarball that makes this change to, but it is not a necessary download if you already have a copy installed, just don't delete your old win32 dir. See the changes and then proceed to the download section. If you manage to patch the GL stuff to work better, I'll be grateful if you send it to me. Also, if anyone is interesting in developing on this project, drop me a line..

November 20, 2000:
avifile is no longer frozen, thank goodness :) In other news, Xtheater is now in a magazine.. in Japan. Linux Magazine by ASCII corporation has Xtheater featured on page 142 of the current issue. In Xtheater-related news, I am gearing up to get what I will call Xtheater 0.9.0 released. I'll then play nice, and set up cvs. I finally feel that it will be in such a condition that it can be worked on by more than one developer. (i.e. tasks have been split into more files.) From a functionality standpoint, many cool things are happening. If you are interested, go to this page.

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Questions? Comments? Bugs? Email
jbjohns4@eos.ncsu.edu