GTK MediaplayEr
foR LINux
News:
27.10.2001: gmerlin-0.1.4 is on the wire
This release brings major feature enhancements for the playback architecture
and for the GUI.
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Gmerlins video architecture now supports videos with alpha channel,
which can come from TGA images or quicktime4linux files with the "raw"
and "png" codecs. The quicktime4linux output plugin can write video streams
with transparency information, if the the input has an alpha channel and
if the video codec is "raw" or "png". You can choose a background color
which will be used, when you play the video with the X11 plugin or convert
it to something without an alpha channel.
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Gmerlin has now generic support for image reader plugins, which
can be used for reading animations (like the old jpeg plugin) and for Skins.
The following image reader plugins have been added:
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A JPEG reader with exactly the same features as the now obsolete jpeg input
plugin
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A TGA reader for reading blender animations
with alpha channel. It reads TGA files with Truecolor RGB (24 bits per
pixel), Truecolor RGB with alpha channel (32 bits per pixel) and greyscale
(8 bits per pixel). Both RLE compressed and uncompressed images are supported.
Colormapped TGAs are not supported yet.
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A PNG reader. PNG is the recommended format for skins.
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The look of gmerlin can now be customized with dynamically loadable skins.
A default skin is incluced in the sourcetree. If you want to make your
own skins, read the file <prefix>/share/gmerlin/skins/Default/skin.def
for an explanation and don't forget to send them to me so I can include
them here.
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Selection of plugins is no longer done in the preferences window. Instead,
detachable plugin menus were added to the main menu. This makes it possible
to change plugins with one single mouseclick.
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You can now click pause if gmerlin is stopped. This will initialize all
plugins. Clicking pause again then starts playback with almost no delay.
In addition, you can now seek while gmerlin is paused.
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The playlist colors are now updated correctly.
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Gmerlin can now handle tracks, which have an unknown total length. This
makes recording possible.
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A plugin for recording from OSS soundcards was also added. With
a fast PC, you can encode analog sources into mp3 or Ogg Vorbis files in
realtime. With a slower PC, save the files as wavs first and encode them
later.
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libmpeg3 was upgraded to version 1.3. Gmerlin is now, at least in theory,
able to play MPEG2 transport streams. Unfortunately, the mpeg plugin doesn't
work with the newer libmpeg3-1.4.
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The seek slider should work correctly now.
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The new mpeg plugin now supports mp3 streams from http connections. This
was tried with icecast and shoutcast.
Gmerlin gets the trackname of such streams from the http header. To load
http streams into gmerlins playlist, you can select "Add URL(s)" in the
playlist menu or simply drop the .m3u file onto the playlist.
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All gmerlin code was upgraded to work with gcc-3.0.1. This is now the only
officially supported compiler for gmerlin.
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The avifile library was upgraded to version 0.6 from the avifile CVS tree.
This was necessary because the old avifile library was terribly old and
caused compilation errors on some systems.
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id3lib was upgraded to 3.0.8pre2 with a patch for gcc-3.0.1
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libmad and lame were removed from the sourcetree. Instead, the sources
from avifile are now used. This reduces both download size and compilation
time.
01.08.2001: gmerlin-0.1.3 came out
We blew up the size of the sourcetree again with some really cool new
features mainly in the audio area. Gmerlin can now be considered as a full
featured cd ripper/encoder.
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This release introduces a new mp3 plugin
based on the high quality mpeg audio decoder mad.
It plays much more strange mp3 formats than the old mpeg plugin.
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The new mp3 plugin as well as the updated lame plugin have now full support
for ID3V1 and ID3V2 tags. A tag editor is included in the
lame configuration window.
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Both the mp3 plugin and the lame output plugin have now full support for
variable bitrate files. The lame plugin writes VBR tags, the mp3
plugin recognizes them.
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An output plugin for EsounD has
been added. It works quite ok but you will hear terrible sounds for a short
time after the playback is paused (Any EsounD gurus tell me why?). For
video files, we recommend the OSS driver, since it provides a much better
synchronization.
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An input plugin and an output
plugin for Ogg Vorbis files were
added (vorbis libraries are included in gmerlin). This enables for example
ogg <-> mp3 conversion (including ID3TAG <-> vorbis comments! ) and
ripping of Audio CDs directly into Ogg Vorbis files.
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The Audio CD plugins now have support for CDDB (no submission yet).
The local database format is compatible with grip. If you have a dialup
connection, gmerlin can collect all disc-IDs in a file and download the
data, when you tell him to do so.
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The "refresh tracks" function now updates the whole playlist for CD audio
plugins (before, it caused a segfault ; ). You can use this, after you
changed the CD in the drive.
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The track name from the playlist can now be constructed from the track
infos, rather than just from the filename. You can enable this in the "Playlist"
section of the main config window. The placeholders for the template string
are described in the documentation of the playlist.
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The cdparanoia plugin was updated to cdparanoia-III-alpha9.8. The paranoia
mode can now be configured. This enables realtime playback and fast ripping
of CDs with many scratches.
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You can now chose the plugin, if you load a file with gmerlins fileselect
box. If you do this, the track will always be loaded with this plugin,
even after refreshing and quitting (It's saved in the playlist file). To
change the plugin of the track, you must remove it from the playlist and
reload.
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The CD player behaves less messy now (If you still find bugs here, please
report them).
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Gmerlin now tries to skip video frames to keep audio and video in sync
on slow systems. This method is, however, far from being perfect. Performance
also depends on how the skipping is implemented in the underlying decoding
libraries (In AVIs and ASFs, there are sometimes much more frames skipped,
than necessary. Avifile-0.6 will provide better skipping). The currently
implemented skipping method also resyncs audio and video after pause.
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Gmerlin is now compiled with optimization and without debugging by default.
If you want to debug gmerlin, call configure with "--enable-debug". This
will also turn off most optimizations.
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Improved window management: Clicking with left mouse button on the window
border resizes the window if it's resizeable. Clicking with the right mouse
button on the border moves the window. Clicking on the window title with
the left or right button moves the window.
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Input- and output
plugins for the Openquicktime
library have been added. They are compiled, if openquicktime can be found
on your system. NOTE: The plugins are very buggy and might crash
gmerlin without warning. Read the file README.openquicktime in the sourcetree
for further infos. The plugins currently have less supported codecs than
quicktime4linux. In the future, when openquicktime supports at least all
openquicktime codecs, we will completely change to openquicktime and include
it in the gmerlin sourcetree.
Since some libraries have been rearranged a bit since the last release,
it's a good idea, to delete the <prefix>/lib/gmerlin directory completely
before installing gmerlin-0.1.3.
18.06.2001: gmerlin-0.1.2 released
NOTE: The download size of this version is a bit smaller than for 0.1.1.
This does not mean, that gmerlin-0.1.2 has less features. There were just
some unused parts removed from the 3rd party libraries.
This release brings some minor feature enhancements as well as several
bug fixes.
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Fixed another set of compilation errors
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No more messed up xterms or segfaults after attempts to load unsupported
files
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Gmerlin no longer hangs if he is quit or plugins are changed during video
playback
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The font of the track display can now be configured
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The libdv subsystem was removed from the gmerlin sourcetree because
it caused compilation errors on some systems.
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Jpeg pictures can now produce planar YUV 420 frames directly if the jpeg
files are 4:2:0 subsampled (should be most) and the width and height are
multiples of 16. This speeds up jpeg playback significantly and reduces
conversion overhead. On a 900 MHz Athlon PC with XVideo output, jpeg pictures
can now be played in realtime with full PAL resolution (720 x 576 @ 25
Fps)
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The trackname for single picture sequences is now constructed correctly
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The Info window shows all installed plugins.
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Gmerlin no longer tells that he can't convert colorspaces because all conversion
routines are implemented now.
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Introduced a colorspace RGB32. This should enable video playback on graphics
cards with 32 bits/pixel and RGB order.
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The state of the engine (playing, seeking etc) is now displayed.
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The track display should no longer flicker because it's now double buffered.
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GUI update: Seeking is now done with an own widget.
While the seek slider is moved, the time display now changes too. This
makes it easier to seek to a specific time in the track.
Some other new features are currently developed. Many of them are, however,
still experimental, so they didn't go into 0.1.2. The next version, gmerlin-0.1.3,
will hopefully contain some more new stuff.
18.05.2001: gmerlin-0.1.1 released
This release hopefully fixes all compilation bugs which occured with
gcc-2.95-2. It also introduces an input plugin
for sequences of single jpeg pictures and an almost
working "refresh tracks"-function for media files. Refreshing a track means
to reread all information (total time, audio/video present) from the file.
Now, libjpeg is needed to compile gmerlin (this shouldn't be a problem),
because loading ordinary jpeg files doesn't work with the included jpeg-mmx
library.
15.05.2001 (few hours later)
I saw, that there is an old notice in the file plugins.html in the
source tree telling that the "mjpa" and "jpeg" codecs are broken in the
Quicktime Output plugin. This is not true, the codecs work well if the
width and height of the video are multiples of 8.
15.05.2001: gmerlin-0.1.0 released
After long nights of 100% brain load and endless debugging sessions,
I'm proud to announce the first public release of Gmerlin. gmerlin-0.1.0
is a developer release with a quality anywhere between alpha and beta.
This means, that many things already work quite ok, while other things
cause gmerlin to crash. Look at the sections about plugins,
for detailed informations of what is currently supported. Until the first
stable release (0.2.0), some new features are planned. See the TODO
file for a list of features that might appear as well as bugs that might
disapear.