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Why the player isn't moving forward

 
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bobef



Joined: 05 Jun 2005
Posts: 269

PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 11:15 am    Post subject: Why the player isn't moving forward Reply with quote

Edit: I have set up a little blog to keep people informed what is going on with the player. Look there for more up to date information.

As some people may have noticed the I am not working on the player for long time now. I know it has some problems and I am not fixing them even when I have the time. Well besides my laziness the reason is in the programming language I used for the development - D. D lacks good, stable, maintained user interface library. And of course good varies for different people. The one I used - DWT (port of Java SWT) I liked very much, but unfortunately it is dead for long time. That was not a problem, because it had everything that I need, but not after Tango came along. Tango is library for D. I will explain for people that are not developers. When you write a program you use a certain programming language. But language itself does nothing but calculations basically. So you need different libraries that do other things. For example DWT does the user interface. Another library may read/write files, etc. So each language comes with standard library, in the case of D it is called Phobos. This library does all the basic stuff like reading/writing files, working with different text encodings, doing math calculations, connecting to the Internet stuff like that. And people start to build more libraries based on this standard library. So DWT is built on Phobos. But Phobos has some issues and the D community built a new library called Tango. And because you usually need several different libraries in a single application these libraries may depend on other libraries. So the UI library I've used (DWT) depends on Phobos, but I need other stuff too that depends on Tango. And I can't use Phobos and Tango together. To make this work I must rewrite the whole DWT library to use Tango which I would not do, because I do not want to maintain DWT and this will be inevitable since it is dead (i.e. its original author abandoned it). As you probably see things are complicated Smile

To say it short. rulesPlayer depends on some thirdparty libraries that are dead. And the main problem is the user interface library. I am willing to port it the player to new library but there are several conditions. The new library must be easy to use (for my taste) and it must be cross-platform (i.e. work on both Windows and Linux). Currently there is no library available for D that matches these conditions. So until this situation resolves this project is pretty much dead. I am keeping eye on the DFL project which is currently being ported to GTK, which means it will work on Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever... And once it is usable I may start working on the player again, because there is no point in fixing the bugs of something that is going to be totally changed and have many new bugs anyway...


Last edited by bobef on Mon Apr 14, 2008 1:10 am; edited 1 time in total
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Guillaume



Joined: 22 Jan 2007
Posts: 19

PostPosted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 10:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for explaining the current situation you're in now concerning this project. First, I'd like to say that rulesPlayer is a damn fine player already, so in my opinion there's no real benefit in or use for different libraries, perhaps even in particular concerning the GUI; it is perfectly fine already. If you're going to use something like GTK, the program is going to be a lot more bloated, such a shame for a light-weight player like this. If someone needs to use a bloated mplayer frontend, they already can use SMPlayer.

I really think I speak for more when I say that rulesPlayer already is complete, and that we rather see the oh so few bugs/problems fixed then a complete rewrite. When I look at the problems I encountered, there are only three:
- The volume setting is only applied after first second
- rulesPlayer should do a forced termination of mplayer.exe when rulesPlayer quits.
- In fullscreen, the bottom progress bar pushes the video up, very annoying.
Just fixing these saves you loads of time, and if you might rewrite rulesPlayer, there's no rush at all, and you'll already have a light-weight rulesPlayer that's completely stable.
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bobef



Joined: 05 Jun 2005
Posts: 269

PostPosted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 1:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Be assured that I will never release something that feels like GTK (at least not for Windows). I really don't like it. Unfortunately there aren't many other options for Linux. Anyway. The only reason I want to rewrite it is because it is using a GUI library that is dead and if I don't rewrite it now I must constantly keep updating this library myself. Which means that sooner or later I will get sick of it and still have to rewrite it. But until then I will waste lot of time keeping DWT up to date. So I prefer to rewrite it sooner than later. But don't worry, keeping the player lightness and speed (and optimizing it even further) is my to priority for this project. This is why I started it in the first place...
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Guillaume



Joined: 22 Jan 2007
Posts: 19

PostPosted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 1:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So, what graphical enhancements are you thinking of, then?
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bobef



Joined: 05 Jun 2005
Posts: 269

PostPosted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 8:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not really enchantments. I like the GUI the way it is. I would like to fix the annoying feature with picture being pushed up (never bothered me though) and make the player available to linux too. I would also like to see if it is possible to use the built in MPlayer playlist so rulesPlayer will support asx files.
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Guillaume



Joined: 22 Jan 2007
Posts: 19

PostPosted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 2:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just encountered something else: am I right when I say that in rulesPlayer there's no way to adjust the delay for subtitles?
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clayasaurus



Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 857

PostPosted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 5:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just use DFL. rulesPlayer does rule, btw.
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bobef



Joined: 05 Jun 2005
Posts: 269

PostPosted: Tue Nov 06, 2007 2:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Guillaume wrote:
Just encountered something else: am I right when I say that in rulesPlayer there's no way to adjust the delay for subtitles?


Well you can send commands directly to MPlayer with "mpcmd" or something like this (type help in the console to see the list of commands). So you can bind a key or place an item in the context menu that sends the appropriate command to MPlayer to delay the subtitles. Keep in mind that some commands are forbidden, like fullscreen.
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bobef



Joined: 05 Jun 2005
Posts: 269

PostPosted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 1:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just a quick update on the topic. I found the new GUI of the player - http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/ . This is a blazing fast embeddable HTML component. In other words the GUI will be in HTML, so sky is the limit Wink
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