AmigaOS4 beta tester Crisot has made another one of his unofficial AmigaOS4 demonstration videos available. This time he demonstrates AmigaOS4’s default movie player MooVId. Download Video (DivX codec required, 4.96 MB) This Saturday Dr. Garry Hare Ph.D., the CEO of the AmigaOS owning company KMOS will make announcements at the AmiWest banquet dinner and hold a live interview on Sunday. People will be able to follow AmiWest by updating webcam images, live audio and live video streaming coverage.
I sure wish somebody that knows how to use a video capture software and or hardware would record some AmigaOS4 software. These tech videos are downright embarassing. There’s almost no point. I can hardly see what the OS looks like. That being said thanks for recording this I suppose something is better than nothing.
Cheers,
Christian Blackburn
> I sure wish somebody that knows how to use a video capture software
Maybe there is no such software available for AmigaOS 4 at this point? What if there’s no video-out except D-SUB on the machine, or AmigaOS 4’s drivers support no additional video-out?
Don’t be so harsh. The bad quality might be the result of a lack of tools/hardware, not competence.
A movie player with a good UI would have impressed me more than viewing 4 movies simultanously…
Sony commercial!!
😛
I never understood what’s so important about the UI of a movie player. The less the better? I want to watch a movie, the end.
So I use mplayer, with some command line options (manly how to arrange stuff) saved as an alias, I never have any concerns about the UI. Some nice keys assigned to stuff and I can watch fullscreen video without stuff in my way.
So, whats about having 4 vids running aside? Well, this is new to AmigaOS I think… it shows that the OS is very usable (having a good scheduler to allow this and so on..)
So, whats about having 4 vids running aside? Well, this is new to AmigaOS I think… it shows that the OS is very usable (having a good scheduler to allow this and so on..)
As far as I can see (I’m not sure) there is still no 2D acceleration and a few parts of the graphics system are still in 68k, yet the movies run fairly smooth. I don’t know whether this has any impact though on movie playback, though.
There is too little information bundled with these movies, such as machine specs, state of the OS4 release he’s running, etc.
Could it signify high performance for video editing? I don’t know, but if video playback is this smooth at the same time as having a totally responsive system, we’ve come far.
@ Ford Prefect
> I never understood what’s so important about the UI of a
> movie player. The less the better? I want to watch a
> movie, the end.
Me too, maybe the *option* for a nice looking virtual remote control can be handy sometimes, but the player UI I prefer to be as bare, functional and inconspicuous as possible.
> So, whats about having 4 vids running aside? Well, this
> is new to AmigaOS I think…
No not really if your hardware is up to it at least (raw computing power, the AOS isn’t the limating factor). Actually AmigaOS is famous for its responsive UI and unmatched pre-emptive multitasking.
To quote from my AmigaOS XL review from a few years ago: “For testing the multitasking and multimedia performance of AmigaOS XL, you could use the example multimedia files stored on the AmigaOS XL CD. There are trailers of both “Charlie’s Angels” and “Monsters, Inc.” included on the CD. Copy these files to your harddisk to see how well several movies can be played simultaneously.”
I remember be able to play up to around 8 trailers simulataneously on a 850 Mhz P3 laptop at the time. This emulator emulated AmigaOS3.9 and 68k applications using a JIT engine.
You could even do such things with MacOS X nowadays! But IMO neither OSX nor AmigaOS XL emulation are this smooth while dragging movies around the screen ans such.
@ Christian Blackburn
> There’s almost no point. I can hardly see what the OS
> looks like.
Maybe you just missed the point?
The point wasn’t to show you what the OS looks like in ultra high quality, there are tons of high resolution screenshots waiting to be found all across the web already.
Here are a few I selected to help you out, my friend:
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/powericonsnap1.png
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/powericonsnap2.png
http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/grab8.jpg
http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/grab5.jpg
http://www.mhd.mh.se/shoe/grab3.jpg
Many more are availabe at websites like AmigaWorld.net and IntuitionBase.com !
The point of the video was more to show the current state of affairs with regard to the multi-tasking and UI responsiveness of AmigaOS. Considering Crisot only has a webcam he can use to record this, I and thousands of other Amigans out there really appriciate his efforts, for his intentions he has done a great job so far and many people are really excited about how the development progresses.
Thanks Crisot, your enthusiasm really shows! 😎
I tried to run this movie four times in a single display on a PC.
Hardware:
P4 1.8 GHz
Radeon7500
384 MB RAM
Software:
Linux 2.6.5
XFree86 4.3
Xine-lib-1rc4a
Xine-ui-0.99.1
Test:
The soundcard in this PC cannot be opened multiple times. I ran the test without sound, i.e. Xine’s “none” driver. A possible solution is to use a sound daemon like Arts or ESD.
There is only one graphics overlay on a Radeon 7500 and most other graphics chips. Therefore Xine’s Xv driver cannot be used. The next best alternative is the Xshm driver, which renders to the frame buffer in RGB.
So I ran this command line:
xine -V xshm -A none moovidamp.avi &
Results:
Al four movies did play perfectly smooth and the computer did remain responsive. It did react to mouse clicks at once etc.
When one window was moved over another the front window continued playing, the back window did its picture to black till stopped moving or dragged the window away.
When a window was rezised it’s image went to black during the resize. When a window was resized to full-screen it’s framerate dropped, apparently software scaling is a very demanding task for Xine.
Conclusion:
Playing several movies at once is a task that can be perfectly accomplished using PC-hardware. Comparing this to AmigaOne hardware the PC-hardware is by far more attractive.
However, the AmigaOS player combined with the AmigaOS windowing system is superior to Xine combined with XFree86. While this might be the expected that XFree86 can be beaten I have actually no sign that XFree86 would prevent programs from updating their display when another window moves above it. It is much more likely that this is a limitation of the Xine media player.
Nevertheless, the AmigaOS solution still is far superior to the PC solution and this has everything to do with the software.
@Daniël Mantione: you mean your linux driver/soundsystem can’t mix several sound sources at the same time…
Leo.
No, the soundcard isn’t capable to. It’s a crappy intel8x0 that is nothing more than a 48000 KHz D/A converter.
In my K6 machine I have a Gravis Ultrasound soundcard. It can be opened by multiple programs and can handle any samplerate. Everything is done by its synthesize, no software involved.
In Linux, the driver/soundsystem never does software mixing. The ALSA developers decided to leave this task to userspace programs. They have their own implementation in their libasound, which is more transparant than Arts or ESD, but it is not developed enough to be a practical solution in practise.
I don’t have an Amiga or Linux but I would call that (ALSA) crap system then. If you can’t have multiple audio sources at same time it is like using MS-DOS. The system must be capable to handle many audio sources at same time.
The question is, do you want a software synthesizer in your kernel? If yes, should it be a simple mixer or a full featured synthesizer.
The ALSA team decided “no” and did start working on a solution in user space. ALSA a new standard, and audio professionals are very happy with it. Within time, this issue will also be soved.
Actually, I hope this won’t get solved for a while, so soundcard manufacturers start to design good soundcards again, they seem to have lost the knowledge to do somehow
Come on !
You know how much CPU software sound mixing of different sources would take on your 1.8Ghz P4 ?
Barely nothing.
Leo.
I too, have a crappy AC97 intel8x0 card (onboard, in my nforce2 motherboard) And the problem is NOT ALSA. Writing hardware mixing drivers for all the different chips would just be too hard for them. The ALSA guys leave it up to the hardware makers, any normal soundcard with linux drivers available can do hardware mixing just fine. However, nvidia (seems anyone with intel8x0 cards are usually using an nvidia mobo) do not release drivers capable of doing hardare mixing.
Amiga fans must have overly developed nostalgia glands.
What made the Amiga what it was, was the uniquely engineered hardware it ran on. That was a lllloooonnnggg time ago now.
No amount of imitation of the OS is gonna bring that back.
Modern Mac’s & PC’s may not be as elegant but they pretty much have the same functionality now.
BeOS came close to giving us a designed for media OS to run on ‘modern’ equipment but is dead.
sheesh!
This site is for info on OS’ not just for Windows or MAC OS.
If you don’t like that then why come here???
Nostalgia is one thing but have you actually used or seen OS4 first hand to say “No amount of imitation of the OS is gonna bring that back.” ???
What made the Amiga what it was, was the uniquely engineered hardware it ran on. That was a lllloooonnnggg time ago now.
Times are changing and so software is the thing that need to be uniquely engineered now to be interesting. Such things is what OSNews is for, to see the wonderful world of alternatives to mainstream stuff
Amiga fans must have overly developed nostalgia glands.
If nostalgia plays 4 videos more responsively than something modern, I’d rather have nostalgia. 🙂
By the way, AmigaOS was quite unique for its time as well.
“What made the Amiga what it was, was the uniquely engineered hardware it ran on.”
It was the combination of the OS and the hardware, not either on its own.
The hardware problems that were solved in the A1000 (full colour screens, video support, decent sound) are no longer problems. Any modern computer can provide them.
There _are_ hardware problems still to be solved.
No Amiga company really has the capital to work on hardware at present. It would indeed be nice to see a new computer with unique and truly innovative hardware.
For the time being we have to be satisfied with a good OS running on standard hardware, unable to do some of the things that the Amiga hardware could do.
Playing several videos at the same time is a (good) thing: but an OS shouldn’t be limited to that
So let’s wait and see how OS4 performs in everydays use: stability, what programs are available and how do they perform (web,…),…
I’m pretty sure that SkyOS in the same way can play several videos at the same time with no problem: but that’s not what will make it sell… The recent port of GTK shows they have understood that software is the key.
Leo.
Hey, why is it taking so long for the announcement to reach here?