Another wish for AmiTube was to have multiple movie directories for easier sorting of movies. I implemented a possibility to do that, now you can add MOVIEDIR1, MOVIEDIR2 and so on to the icon to have multiple movie directories. In the Project menu one can choose which movie directory should be used for next download or loading of local files.
Will be included in AmiTube 1.2.
A little preview for the next AmiTube Version, one wish was a play list like feature to play the downloaded movies automatically or by random or in a loop.
I thought about that feature, the main problem, would be how to stop the actual playing, because when you just start AGABlaster one after the other, how to stop the actual playing, therefore I decided to add a little announcement Screen for 5 seconds where you can stop the current play list.
So stay tuned and look forward to the next release.
I also fixed some bugs in the fancy list.
I finished some bug reports (most related to the fancy list), big thanks to the beta testers, especially „HANsolo“ who found the most bugs, thanks very nice work.
One thing I changed, The „Auto icon load“ setting in prefs will now also set the fancy list to auto load the icons or not, that way I guess it is maybe also usable on slower Amigas as well. I tried out on my real A1200 (with TF1260, AGA 32 color screen) and even with the icon preview on, it’s not that bad, certainly fast enough to work with it. I like it.
So the changes for this Version are quite short:
Download as always via the Updater in the Program or on the AmiTube page
Finally I found some mood to work on the new list feature in AmiTube, the so called fancy list, including the title, description and preview image directly in the list.
For that I use a background task to download and load the images, usually such things I use a Thread with Event system behind it. But it seems not to work, most of the time it works fine but then from time to time it locks up completely, total dead lock. After some debugging I found the culprit in my TEvent implementation for Amiga systems in AThreads, the two cases when the Event is already set when you start to wait for it (or the Even is already destroyed) are not covered properly and it leaves the routine with the semaphore locked, easy fix but hard to find.
But back to the list, one can switch to the fancy list, but that also means it auto loads the images, so it will be only good for faster Amiga/RTG or NG Amiga or so.
Working quiet nicely already. Also I got some updated localization for AmiTube which will be released with the next version.
Last weekend I tried to bring the AROS 64 interface of Free Pascal up to the current level. Some might remember, I created a special automatic checker which you can use to check the records in the pascal units against the structs in the official C includes. An it ensures that all the records and field there is have the same name across all Amiga-like platforms. I already used it for AROS ABIv0 and MorphOS and a bit on Amiga 68k (there are some problems with structs inside structs).
With this tool on hand it was rather easy to check where my AROS units must be changed to be 64-bit and ABIv11 compliant, I tested it and it worked well.
As next step I thought about to update my distribution (0.3.1?) I checked out the latest AROS version and tried to compile for myself. Good thing it works much better than before, bad thing it tries to download a bunch of stuff from the internet (like binutils, gcc and so on) but the server referenced there seems to be offline (sure why one should use the official GNU source, better use some weird 3rd party server which does not work), so I had to get them from the official GNU webpage by hand, annoying!
I tried to compile the native boot-able variant, it compiles, but it does not work, directly after grub when you try to start the kernel it crashes (tried in qemu/vmware, no difference) so still nothing new here. Fall back like last time to Linux hosted. BUT whats that some of my programs crash at very unusual places, on running Threads, hard to debug actually. It seems like a structure has changed.. So I got out my automatic checker again and, yes it found that there is a change in the structure, old T100pUAD 0.3 programs cannot work anymore (or only by random).
The reason I decided to publish „The 100% useless AROS distribution Version 0.3“ was that the ABI, so the binary interface is promised to be fixed now.
| component | kept stable |
|---|---|
| Application Binary Interface (ABI) | YES |
| OS 3.1 API (examples: exec.library, input.device) | YES |
| 3rd party public libraries API (example: muimaster.library) | YES |
| Classes, gadgets, datatypes API (examples: png.dataype) | YES |
| AROS driver system (HIDD, oop.library) | NO |
| AROS kernel components (example: kernel.resource) | NO |
This was in January, now not even three(!) month later that promise is already broken, void, not existing anymore. What a big disappointment. Of course no developer, let alone User will use such a system.
This is especially annoying when you notice, that the structure change is 100% unnecessary and useless (and 100% incompatible with original 68k code).
Finally here it is the 1.0 of AmiTube a lot of changes. As shown before now it contains a Download queue to start more than one conversation/download job which are processed one after the other. A Typical Amiga thing is the AREXX interface, all good programs have it, therefore AmiTube needs that as well. There are commands to search and to start a convert job and play a movie.
For this new Version I will also supply a Version for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS due to popular demand.
Next to the search bar is now a Button which opens the search history.
Changes:
Download as always on the AmiTube Page
Next days I will also Update the Dcker container for the new features.
A new feature will be included in the next AmiTube Version, a Download Queue, so if you have a conversation/download job running you can continue browsing and add an other one which will be performed after the first one is finished.
This should be especially useful for slower network system. You can simply select some videos you like to have and then let the program work without supervision
Look forward to 1.0.
AmiTube 1.0 will be available for all, from 68000 to 68060, from PowerPC and i386 to x64 and ARM, for all the modern OS Workbench 3.0 to 3.9, including 3.1.4 and 3.2, AmigaOS4 line and MorphOS up to 3.15, AROS ABIv0 and ABIv11.
As I said last time AmiTube on AROS64 is kind of useless because no player for MPEG or CDXL available, but actually there is. There is an MPlayer available, so I added it to the distribution and linked it in AmiTube and got a crash. Mplayer needs a lot of stack and it is too small, even I set the stack higher when calling Mplayer still the same, debugoutput suggests the stack is not properly given to the app called by AmiTube. I filed a bug report, lets see how fast that is handled.
As workaround I created a script to call mplayer with the right stack and voila it plays as it should be.
Time for a little video
Two things to notice, first when loading the remote list the list is totally destroyed, this is what I meant with the font size calculation is wrong, because what it does is to draw all the text over each other and also the column lines suggest that it calculated the font width as zero, but when you select the entries it cures the problem, I heard that it also happens on 68k AROS.
the second thing some people told me they are unable to place the movie directory into RAM and then play with MPlayer from it, as you see it works smoothly without any problems.
As mentioned yesterday it’s time to make a new AROS 64 release with the new ABI-V11. So here it is. As far as I know, still the only x64 AROS distribution.
As always I included some of my programs like MUIMapparium, LEU, AYA, AmiTube, Hex2, MUIPlot, MCAmiga. All work reasonably well, certainly usable. There are some problems of course. There seems to be a bug on Font size calculation, therefor some size calculations fail, resulting in strange effect, for example ListViews of Zune (like in MUIMapparium or AmiTube), but one can see that also in AYA, where I calculate the size of text for myself. a rescale of window and selecting of entries often cures it. AmiTube works well, shows preview images and downloads all the movies, but there is no working player for CDXL or MPEG installed atm.
As always the warning, the x64 AROS is still a very early alpha Version, most non Free Pascal applications crash so be careful, but as test bed for Free Pascal on a 64bit Amiga-Platform it certainly a good test.
Download as always on the T100pUAD Page