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!
I tried the YoutTube client now on my real A1200 (with a 68060) and it works nicely, of course the network speed is much slower than that in UAE. But it’s still ok, not too long waiting times. (with that short videos). It depends very much on the video how good they look in 160 px width and only 32 colors, of course such Eric Schwartz videos are nice they had only very little colors. But I also found different ones like this „Seed“ looks very nice even so small.
I played around with different settings and noticed that not the conversation to CDXL is here the slow bit (its only 3-4 seconds, because it’s not HAM but just 32 colors) but the download speed from youtube. It seems that YouTube throttles downloads of the movies… hmm of course they want you to force to watch them on the page. But hey what can you do, it’s just for fun.
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)
I use my bicycle regularly, drive every day to work and nearly every day a little round as training just for fun. Having and iPhone and Apple Watch, it’s very easy to record the tracks with that (I use an app called „Trailes“) of course would be even nicer to have some statistics about it, sadly the App does not really have that.
Therefore I coded my own little tool to show some statistics about my last rounds, as always for the last programs I did I coded it with Free Pascal for Amiga and it worked quiet nicely and easy, most of the stuff is already there in MUIMapparium (reading GPX files and calculating track properties)
So here it is:
2 hours of work and it loads the GPX data and shows them in a nice little table with settings to choose the columns and sort them by it. Free Pascal power at its best.
Charlie was introducing SinclairQL port of Free Pascal, another platform using m68k processor. To be honest I never heard of it before. It also uses vasm and vlink as on Amiga, so it’s rather easy to create the cross compiler for it, the port is still in a very early stage but some stuff is already working, for example my HEX2 pocket calculator already works nicely (after some tine bugfixes 😉 in the code and in the Free Pascal code). I got a emulator for SinclairQL and it works, very nice.
If you want to try you can download the program here: Hex2-QDOS
Some little facts I should mention, the source was developed for TurboPascal 3.3 for CP/M (for my KC85) I tried a lot o things, all seems to work, but maybe some errors still hidden.
Because it was developed for KC85, so very little RAM available I decided to load the error messages and help messages from file only when needed. But that seems not so easy on SinclairQL. I had to add the „mdv1_“ (representing the first microdrive) before the filename that it can find the help or error file. Until now it seems there is no way to find out at which drive my program is (ParamStr(0) is empty), so I just hard coded that for now.
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
Besides the documentation work I also updated the docker container. I created 4 scripts to compile directly from the docker (without using VNC/lazarus) so you can directly compile in your linux installation, that there is a docker container behind it you barely notice. But it only can compile standard Free Pascal things, no LCL applications (missing pathes to the lcl units, also not easy possible, but without Lazarus make not much sense, I think)
The AROS compilation had a big problem, when you compile without -g option it tries to strip but the strip tool was not installed, so I added some more tools to make it possible to compile without -g (makes the executable much smaller)
On this I updated the lazarus version to the latest version 2.0.12 as well.
If you want to use the newest Version of the docker (with the AROS bugfix) start the „CheckForUpdate.sh“ script if you also want to have the direct compile command download the CrossAmigaLazarus Package.
