the next Version of AmiTube will give the choice which format you want your youtube video converted to, here are the specs for each format and an estimated size for a 30 seconds video:
standard CDXL Video 160px 32 colors 12 fps Audio: mono 11040 kHz 8 bit; for OCS Amiga (e.g. 4.4 Mbyte)
enhanced CDXL Video 160px 256 colors 12 fps Audio: mono 11040 kHz 8 bit; for AGA Amiga (e.g. 8.8 MByte)
VCD MPEG1 Video 320px, 24 bit colors 24 fps, Audio: stereo 44100 kHz 16 bit; for fast RTG Amigas (e.g. 5.0 Mbyte)
One can easily see, how the quality increases which each setting and how much better MPEG1 is in comparison with CDXL, but of course for a standard Amiga such Video CD MPEG1 is much too slow to play and thats the power of CDXL to play even on such slow hardware.
Just to finish that (for me the program and services around are now more or less finished) I will publish this AmiTube program which you can use to watch short YouTube videos on your ordinary Amiga 68k.
As one can notice in the last video I changed my setup from MultiView to AGABlaster, which is much better to play the CDXL videos, faster and smoother, also the palette switching works better. (you can change the default player in Preferences)
If you use that program, remember the conversation is done on my Server, please do not overdo it (try to convert a 2 hour video or convert hundreds of videos) other (and myself) need that Server for other things as well 😉
And please do not share or publish this program, anywhere! If one want to have it, here its free download it from my page. Thanks!
You thought it would be impossible to let an m68k Amiga play YouTube videos, you are surely mistaken, lets have a look:
You remember the CDXL stuff I showed before? Of course with that you can create a relatively low quality video from an YouTube video, and if you do that on a server and just download the converted video file you can watch youtube videos on your amiga.
The search and downloading is done via youtube_dl the conversation to CDXL using the docker container I showed earlier.
Sorry for the bad sound, but it seems to be my UAE setup is a bit strange in sound settings, never really used the sound there, also other sounds sounds a bit crackly. I should try that video on a real Amiga and with other players than Multiview to see, or better hear, if its better, or the conversation is so weak.
I remember I had some problems with the sound in big bug bunny movie as well, the sound was not loud enough and the 8 bit conversation made it really bad.
Maybe you remember when I improved the TProcess implementation for MorphOS using a Chess GUI and an uci chess client. The Author of that chess client contacted me to ask if I could publish the Chess GUI. I did not plan to publish it because it was really just a test, but ok, why not. It also includes the Source (LGPL) and some engines (also the mentioned predateur, which works nicely)
It’s very common on 68k Amiga to turn off the operating system and directly write to hardware registers to get maximum speed. Many games and demos does it this way. Usually they are written in assembler, but of course this is also possible with Free Pascal for Amiga.
I got that idea because Charlie did a little test how small a program in Free Pascal on Amiga can be. (I guess it can be even smaller than that, when replacing the DosWrite(Output()) by PutStr() and compile for 68020).
So I took his source and tried to make a little bit more useful example out of it and remembered my time doing Amiga 68k Assembler (in ASM-One, I was never good with that, but hey I can learn a bit now)
So I did a little copper list example and it’s 700 bytes long, not bad, as second I tried some bit-plane manipulation. The program became around 3kbyte (most of that is because of the huge sinus table included).
And it runs very nicely on my A1200.
The Source with compiled executable is available on Gitub.
New Release of Free Pascal is done. It’s a bug fix release for 3.2.0 it has also some bug fixes for the Amiga systems, especially structures and functions are checked against official SDKs (especially for MorphOS with its latest SDK Version). For changes that break compatibility you can check official changes document.
And a little Bugfix for Ask Your Amiga, especially on AROS, the images would not load properly, fixed that very quickly. Download as always at the AYA Page
I added assumptions to Ask Your Amiga. Assumptions are the way the different meaning of one word are separated from each other in Wolfram alpha. For example if you ask for „Berlin“ it will show you information about the capital of germany, but also shows you a list of other cities (mostly in USA) named Berlin and also other meanings like Berlin as a name or a music band (never heard that before) and so on.
Like on the web page I put these assumptions to at the top of the results to select from a cycle widget.
AYA 0.5 with Assumptions
Download latest AYA at hte AYA Page or use the build-in Update Version
Still trying the TProcess and Pip stuff on MorphOS (I do not want to steal the gdb from Charlie though 😉 ). I remembered, a while before someone told me that he has a shell based chess program for MorphOS compiled Predateur. It uses a rather common command line API (uci). I also found a UCI GUI written in FreePascal the GUI itself is made with fpGUI, but that’s not a big problem. I changed the GUI to MUIClass and try it. It did not work directly on the first try, there are some problems with the TProcess. I have to think about that, how to solve. But with a little bit tweaking it works now. You can play chess nicely. The author of the GUI also has some uci compatible engines written in FreePascal, but they sometimes crash after some moves. But this Predateur one works quite nicely. Disclaimer: I’m very bad at chess, never really played, barely know the rules.
Again got a crazy idea… after my attempts to run the Free Pascal test suite on a real m68k linux (I’m not sure whats the problem it it just stopped at some point but did not start the actual tests) I looked a bit closer how these test run is designed (with a bit Makefile, which does not work on Amiga even with unix kind shell installed, I tried already) I wrote a little program make the list of tests and I got around 5800 test, not the same amount as the original (which is nearly 9000) but ok for first list creation, later maybe find out where are the other tests hidden.
the „dotest“ util making the actual test (checking if on the right CPU/OS/Version and so on) does not run because it’s only implemented for windows/dos and unix… and full of {ifdef windows}doDOSstuff{$else}doUNIXstuff{$endif} or vice versa… I made some very nasty changes and implemented a little routine for Amiga to make it at least work to run the tests gather the output and check return code and it works.
Next transfer everything to my Amiga (Draco 68060 in this case) and start and press all thumbs it works somehow.
And? Yeah it works, needs around 10s per test hmmm that makes around 16h for the full 5900 tests :-O ok the Draco is very stable, I just hope none of the test let it crash 😉 lets see tomorrow the result, which tests fail and why 😉 (running currently with 3.2)
If that works well I should also make a run with FPU (thats SoftFPU atm.)
