eean

So I'm visiting my parents in Fulton for the holidays. My laptop doesn't really have the horsepower to compile kdelibs or Amarok, so I've been continuing work on Dragon Player (when not eating chocolate oranges or cookies anyways). Mostly just odds and ends. I have a KPart version of Dragon Player that links and installs, but I haven't actually figured out how to test it (it shows up in Konqueror's configuration, but Konqueror never appears to use it).



I've setup a website for Dragon Player at Kollide, the server brought to you by PBS Amarok Users Like You. The scary screenshot is thanks to the trailer from some movie called Dragon Wars I hadn't heard of before, but it seems appropriate. I actually had to hack phonon-xine to display using the "xshm" video output, otherwise it wouldn't make a screenshot.



You can see its a rather barren website for the moment. I actually like the current Dragon Player icon (the Codeine movie clapperboard icon), but I really could use a Dragon and movie-themed logo for the website and to fill up the black space when no movie is being played. Any volunteers?

First off, I've graduated Truman State University with a Computer Science major. Hooray! It's been a good 4.5 years, I would do it again.



So I've decided to rename Codeine/Video Player to Dragon Player. Its named in honor of KDE's mascot Konqui of course. I've always been a fan, I requested and received a Konqui shirt back when I was in 11th grade for my birthday (which is 3 or 4 years before I started coding for KDE).



I've also gone ahead and made a release, Dragon Player 2.0 Alpha 1. I hope to generate some feedback and interest from KDE4 distributions (I believe Mandriva is already packaging it from SVN). There's still some rough edges and it doesn't have some features I plan on adding in the final form, but its pretty much there. The most notable part missing is the KPart, I do plan on working on that pretty soon.



Dragon Player doesn't have a web page yet, that should come out soon.

Just read that Terry Pratchett has a rare early onset Alzheimer's. As he points out he ain't dead yet, but its still sad to think about the decade or two or three of books that now won't be written (assuming he doesn't pull a Stephen Hawkins).



In Pratchettian style he notes that frequently people want to help in such situations, but he'd only accept offers from "very high-end experts in brain chemistry."



In entirely unrelated news (and just to make this somewhat KDE related), Video Player should start remembering your position when you reopen a video pretty soon. While poking around the Phonon API today I remembered the issue I had with adding a context menu to fullscreen mode when I was working on it back in the Spring... but thats for later.

Recently I've been working again on Video Player; see the blog announcing Video Player if you wondering what I mean (the summary: its Codeine 2.0). It's codebase is nice and small so its pretty easy to make some progress. First thing I did was remove the remaining dependencies on KDE 3 Support and Qt 3 Support. I can't really say its fully ported yet, but its certainly no longer using any deprecated APIs. Thanks to some help from Matt Rogers of Kopete fame, it also no longer crashes on exit. In fact it has no known crashes, an important milestone with any software, though a state that's usually short-lived.



Phonon in KDE 4.0 will not have APIs for subtitle or multiple audio streams (like on DVDs and .mkv files). So Matthias Kretz added a property to the Phonon Xine backend to give direct access to xine_stream_t, an important data structure in Xine. I was able to use this property to add subtitle support for Video Player. Currently it doesn't have any way of knowing when a new subtitle is available (for instance on a DVD, the title screen may have no subtitles, but then they are available when you start playing the movie), and it just asks Xine every 5 seconds. Hopefully I can find some solution for this, perhaps from the Phonon Xine engine or directly from Xine.



This all means Video Player will have a direct dependency on Xine and the Phonon Xine engine until at least KDE 4.1 (though it could probably work with other engines, just without subtitle or multiple audio streams).



When I have more time (I have a Stat final tomorrow) I plan on fixing up all the little features that make Codeine great, mostly involving keeping state.



I actually do have an idea for a less generic but still simple name for Video Player, but I'll keep it private until I buy the domain.