Monday, February 5. 2007NicePlayer 0.95 the Shiny PenguinAlthough NicePlayer is still Mac OS X only and will probably stay that way, it’s now open source and what better animal than a penguin represent open source (even though it suggests linux)...plus NicePlayer’s icon and widgets are shinier (they literally have a sheen now) so that’s why this release is the Shiny Penguin1. 1 Previous releases were the Dark Horse and the Bad Wolf. Open SourceNicePlayer is tri-licensed under the MPL, LGPL, GPL. They are all copyleft licenses, MPL (Mozilla Public Licenses) is the least restrictive it terms of reuse. MPL is not what “GPL-haters” like to call viral as it only pertains to the licensed code that you are modifying and not the rest of your projects code that is incorporating it. Shiny ControlsI gave the controls sheen, they extend across the movie bounds continuously when the video is black it’s more obvious that they are controls and not strange floating symbols. SubtitlesI’ve also added basic external subtitle support, it was something I wrote simple parsers for a year ago, but never added a renderer, I kept on putting it off, so finally decided to put it in this release get some feedback. It’s already been reported that I don’t allow the encodings to be set for subtitles. When this was reported I figured it’d automatically work with UTF-8, but it actually automatically treats it as a c string unless a Byte Order Mark is at the front of the file. This typically doesn’t get added for UTF-8 because it can mess things up for some kinds of files (though it does not in this case). So the next version I will change it to the 10.4 api’s, which have been improved for dealing with encodings. We probably will stick to making UTF-8 and UTF-16 the only guaranteed way of your encodings working (with out BOM being necessary for UTF-8), because even if most subtitles out there aren’t Unicode they should be, and it’s not hard to convert (we may include a simple converter next release too), and that is preferable to adding a huge list of encodings in the preferences. PerianPerian has helped shape some of the features for this release. I’ve been compiling from source seeing what is in store for version 1.0, such as matroska support. My test file had chapters,subtitles, and alternate audio all show up in QuickTime Player. So I added menus so they can be used with the CoreVideo engine in NicePlayer too. Also the current version of Perian has FLV support, so we added an association for that file type so you can opened by double click. Virtual DVDsAnother program that inspired a feature was Virtual DVDs. Virtual DVDs allows you to wrap a VIDEO_TS folder in a bundle with the extension .vdvd which makes it double clickable from the finder to open in DVD Player. So I adopted their convention so you that can double click one of those same .vdvd bundles to open in NicePlayer as well. Scary TransparencyFinally last feature I’d like to note is that we’ve made it possible to make movie windows transparent. I’m not sure there’s a good reason for it (beyond a couple people asking for it), but then again it only can be invoked via applescript (so it doesn’t clutter up the GUI). We have a default script under the heading “Just For Fun”. RundownHere’s the official change list for 0.95:
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I wish you could put a tarball of the source on the sourceforge.net project page and keep a link, so we can download the source easily. Thanks for the updates. The new interface is pretty good, though I will miss the old one Yeah i’ll put zip archive up of the source tonight on the sourceforge downloads page. I couldn’t find the source archive on sourceforge project page. Please upload it as soon as you can. Sorry I came down with the flu that night, instant fever, and then forgot later that week. Tarred, Bzipped and uploaded as of now. We have a subtitle renderer in Perian with complete Unicode/SSA support; it’ll be out with 1.0. So you don’t need to work too hard on that. I’ll probably be looking into NicePlayer to do some work with moving decoding into OpenGL shaders sometime. (reposting because i blasted it with spam accidentally) Oh I’m aware, i’ve been building from trunk to try out the latest features, but there are a couple of advantages to niceplayer having it’s own external subtitle support rather than only relying on perian support, * for plain subtitles(which might be what we stick to), NicePlayer can draw outside the view (which is currently done in fullscreen mode) * NicePlayer has the abilty to add a UI for attaching external subtitle files of any name (which we will do in future versions) * and by having support separate from the engine, we can then provide support for all niceplayer engines especially those that don’t support external subtitles such as DVD engine (which almost works in this version, but will be fixed in the next versioI really want to make the first two supported in Perian directly. You can already do the first one by adjusting the track movie box; it scales up as much as you want and handles aspect ratio stuff. The second, I’m not sure. If you open a .ssa file currently it ignores it instead of making a movie with it. This is definitely something to work on post-1.0. |
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