Need a software developer or systems administrator for Unix or NT systems? Look
at my resume.
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.
Requirements:
If you want to assist in the project, drop me a line.
Questions? Comments? Bugs? Email jbjohns4@eos.ncsu.edu