gmerlin / News: Recent posts

New gmerlin packages are now ready for download.
See webpage (http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net)
for details.

It's here:

http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/doc/avdec/modules.html

Online documentation can be reached here:

http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/doc/gavl/modules.html

NOTE: This is very preliminary. Some things are documented
but won't work at all. Furthermore you need the latest CVS
for all functions to work.

Nevertheless if should give you an idea what gavl will be like
in the next release

Brave people, who check out CVS and even manage to
compile it, will notice some nice new features:

- Audio CD support: For the player only for now. The
plugin will be extended for CD ripping also (with cdparanoia),
so it will be possible to drag CD tracks from the player into
the transcoder. Metadata are downloaded from Musicbrainz.

- New formats for decoding: Vivo (damn old and poor
quality video format), and Musepack (High quality
lossy audio format/codec).... read more

Due to a problem in the file release system at sourceforge,
some broken files creeped onto the download page.
We uploaded them again and they should be ok now.

Rumours are spreading, that some sample WAV files contained in Windows-XP are made with a cracked version
of SoundForge. The corresponding info is in the
INFO-chunk at the very end of these files.

So for the Longhorn developers out there:

Next time you really should use gmerlin_transcoder (available
in CVS) for making your WAVs. First advantage is, that
you don't have to crack it, second advantage is, that
writing INFO chunks isn't supported yet :-)

CVS now contains a transcoder application
(gmerlin_transcoder).

It reads all files, gmerlin can read and encodes them
info wav files, quicktime movies or single pictures.
More encoding plugins will arrive when the encoding
API is somewhat frozen.

It's still very beta, but maybe some of you want to try it?

Allright, CVS now contains some new stuff:
* A demuxer for .aac files with ID3V2 support (ADTS only for
now)
* A decoder for uncompressed RGB AVI video
* A generic PCM decoder (Yes, MPEG with lpcm audio is
supported now).
* Demuxer for raw a52 (a.k.a ac3) streams

The CVS Repository now contains the sourcetrees
of gmerlin-0.3.x and gavl (the audio/video support library for gmerlin).
If you compile this, you'll get a player which plays
OggVorbis files, nothing else.
In the near future, additional directories with plugins for MPEG, AVI, ASF, RM and Quicktime will follow. These
sources already exist, but need some cleaning before they go into CVS.

After some work on the new gmerlin codebase, It becomes clear, what the next gmerlin (version 0.3.0) will look like:

- gavl will be the "working horse" library for handling and converting uncompressed audio and video data. It contains all time critical media handling routines.

- Built on top of gavl, libgmerlin contains all common code used by gmerlin applications. Any application will be able to link with libgmerlin to utilize gmerlins media plugins. Libgmerlin is independent from the toolkit and X11, so you can also write commandline tools with it. The design strategy is to develop small test applications along with the library modules, and check them with valgrind. Thus, the future gmerlin can be expected to be much more stable. All fileformats (playlists, config files, plugin registry) are XML based, making libxml2 a requirement for gmerlin.... read more

Although the last gmerlin release is still a "pre"-release and it's quite old now, there has been heavy development the last time.

After using gmerlin as the default media player for some years now, the following decisions were made for the future development:

1. The code will be almost completely rewritten, splitting it into separate modules, which are:

- gavl for handling and converting all audio and video data.
- A plugin layer, which lets you load plugins from simple C programs (no X required). Plugins give and take gavl audio- and video frames. With this, you can already write commandline players with little brain load.
- Separate playback engines for recording, transcoding and realtime playback. This allows heavy optimization for the different tasks as well as some features, which couldn't be integrated into the old architecture (interactive DVD-menus).
- A GUI layer (based on gtk2), which builds configuration dialogs for plugins from xml data.
- Every fileformat (config file, playlists) will be based on xml, thus, gmerlin will require libxml2.... read more

If you get errors like:

Gdk-ERROR **: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
serial 369 error_code 3 request_code 128 minor_code 2
Gdk-ERROR **: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
serial 370 error_code 3 request_code 128 minor_code 2

you can open the file src/playlistwidget.cc and delete the lines 843 and 844. This should help.

It's always a problem, if C++ programmers try to write something in C. Some of these problems (which didn't confuse the C frontend of my gcc-3.0.2) are solved now. so gmerlin should compile pretty well.

Have fun and report problems

gmerlin-0.1.6pre1 comes with a DVD plugin (kind of alpha status for now), libquicktime support and many, many bugs fixed.

From now on, all bugs should be reported for the 0.1.6pre1 version.

This is a maintainance release of visualizer4esd. It became necessary because visualizer4esd-0.0.1 didn't work with goom-1.8.x.

Note, that goom-1.8.x will crash with visualizer4esd, if fullscreen is enabled before the goom window is switched on. This bug is currently under investigation and will be fixed in visualizer4esd or goom (depending on where it is :-).

This fixes one bug and one compilation error.

2 bugs were found in gmerlin-0.1.5:

1. The compilation of the file in_dvd.cc (which is actually unused for now) can fail. To fix this, you can either install libdvdread on your system or remove the file in_dvd.cc from the libgmerlin_mpeg_la_SOURCES section of src/plugins/libgmerlin_mpeg/Makefile.am and recompile. The last possibility works only, if you have automake installed on your system.... read more

Get it here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gmerlin/gmerlin-0.1.5.tar.gz

This fixes some compilation errors, which occured with gcc-2.95 or if the libmad decoder was installed systemwide.

I also upgraded the skin engine with support for transparent title pixmaps for the
playlist- and video window.

Bug are very smart when finding a way of creeping into gmerlins sourcecode.

If you want to play multiplexed MPEG streams with audio or VCDs, edit the file src/plugins/libgmerlin_mpeg/demuxer.cc and change the line 878 from

if(audio_decoder->init())

to

if(!audio_decoder->init())

and recompile. Otherwise, gmerlin will tell you, that the file cannot be opened.

Get it here:

http://telia.dl.sourceforge.net/gmerlin/gmerlin-0.1.5pre3.tar.gz

This is hopefully the last prerelease for gmerlin-0.1.5.
It has again lots of bugs fixed.

There could some cosmetic changes be made (some dialogs look a bit ugly), but in principal I would release this as gmerlin-0.1.5 in a week or so.

Please test it and report any bugs. These parts are new and need special attention:

- Up/downmixing routines: There are now routines for mixing every loudspeaker combination to every other. Since their number is really large, not all of them could be tested. If you hear strange sounds or nothing at all, please copy the audio formats of the input and output
plugins from the info window and paste them into the gmerlin help forum.... read more

Get your copy here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gmerlin/gmerlin-0.1.5pre2.tar.gz

This is the second prerelease for gmerlin-0.1.5.
It has fewer bugs and better performance than gmerlin-0.1.5pre1 as well as some new features.

There are several open problems (mainly small things) to be solved for gmerlin-0.1.5, but this is roughly what you can expect.

- Upgraded quicktime4linux with OggVorbis and Opendivx support. (Vorbis encoding doesn't work yet)... read more

Get here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gmerlin/gmerlin-0.1.5pre1.tar.gz

This is a prerelease for gmerlin-0.1.5.
Please test it and report any undocumented bugs.

If you get the error massage "cannot up/downmix", copy the Input and Output
formats from the console and paste them into the gmerlin-help forum.
This is, because not all up/downmixing routines are written yet.

New features:

- 5.1 output on Creative 5.1 soundcards.
- Video support in the new mpeg plugin
- VCD plugin
- Avifile output plugin for encoding AVIs
- Ffmpeg output plugin for encoding many formats (avi, mpg, rm)
- Architecture optimizations bring greatly improved startup speed and much faster format conversions.

This release brings major feature enhancements for the playback architecture and the GUI: Support for videostreams with alpha channel, Generic support for livestreams and recording, mp3 plugin plays icecast and shoutcast streams, GUI supports skins, plugin for recording from OSS soundcards was added, many libraries were updated