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
I like to play video games, especially open world games, my daughter also loves to play video games, some video game we like both, like Horizon Zero Dawn or Forbidden West. For this fathers day my daughter gifted me a special present a Lego set from the Horizon world, a Tallneck.
Of course I played with Lego when I was little, but I never build any of these Lego sets (only used the custom default blocks). This weekend we started to build it and it is quite funny actually to do it together, especially because some parts must be created twice. Therefore once one search for the correct pieces the other one build them together, and for the second part (mostly mirrored part) one can switch the jobs. It has 1222 pieces and we needed around 4 hours to build it. To be honest, I expected a a longer time, but the manual is quite good really shows every single step very clearly.
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.
I bought a new bike, which I will use mainly for training (and keep the other bike for my daily way to work). Because my usually training round has a lot of rough streets in it I decided against a racing bicycle, but I do not go too rough terrain so a mountain bike was also not suitable. I found something in between called gravel bike, still very light but it will not break directly when you jump a curb or drive a forest path. It should be very light so I search for a full carbon frame. Finally I found a very nice one and noticed there is even a shop nearby where I could test it.
It’s a Cannondale Topstone Carbon 6 in abyss blue and drives very nicely you can easily notice the weight difference when driving.
It comes with a build in wheel sensor which connects to iPhone via Bluetooth LE to increase precision of speed and distance recording parallel to GPS. But to record my training I still prefer the Trails app. The cannondale app is free and works fine but has no export to GPX feature (it has no way of exporting the recorded tracks as it seems, only as picture) which I need to load the track to MUIMapparium.
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.
