ANNOUNCE gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.9.2

gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.9.2 have been released

gnome-mplayer:
http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-0.9.9.2.tar.gz

gecko-mediaplayer:
http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-0.9.9.2.tar.gz

Changes

gecko-mediaplayer

identify and fix problems from 0.9.9 including better playlist support and support for firefox 3.5, 3.6 and Opera.

Opera still has issues with apple.com/trailers sites, due to user agent issues.

gnome-mplayer

A ton of translation updates and additional languages.
Better seeking using position tracker
Several assertion fixes


Kevin

gnome-mplayer and volume getting set to 100%

If you are using gnome-mplayer and have pulse audio installed on your machine, you may notice situations where the volume is set to 100%. This appears to be an issue with mplayer and pulse audio. My suggested work around is to use the pulse audio alsa emulation. To do this select 'alsa' as the default audio output in gnome-mplayer.

The problem stems from the change in pulse audio from separate volumes per each application to a single flat volume control. So if flat volumes are disabled on your system, you will not experience this issue.

This issue happens by default on Fedora 12 when used with mplayer from rpmfusion, so adjust your configurations as needed.

RPMFusion bug #1011

Google Chrome on Linux with videos at http://www.apple.com/trailers

Many people are now starting to ask me if gecko-mediaplayer works on Google Chrome on Linux. For the most part I can say yes, but the main exception appears to the media at http://www.apple.com/trailers . What appears to be happening is that the code to switch the user agent from Chrome to QuickTime does not appear to be working. I believe this is due to Chromes emulation (or not) of the NS_GetServiceManager function call. So until that is fixed, apple.com media will be unplayable in Chrome on Linux.

r600 tearfree video on Linux, it is a reality

For some reason I always read "tear" as in crying. I understand that tearing can make some people cry so maybe I am not that far off. Anyway, I got the latest git of drm-radeon-testing, libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati. After installing all that everything seems to be running really nicely. I can drag an gnome-mplayer window around the screen and the video does not exhibit any tearing. Even large windows like a browser look good. The only tearing I do get is when I drag a window from one display to another in my dual head setup. I talked to agd5f on #radeon and he said that was due to different pixel clocks on the two displays. He said it could be fixed in software, however. I said while it would be nice to have fixed. I'm sure there are more important things to deal with first.

Album Cover Art with Shoutcast

I noticed that many shoutcast sites have their track data in a common format "Artist - Song Title'. Based on this, I could use the code I use to obtain the album cover art for MP3 files where not much meta data is available. So a simple parse of the content and a call to the art lookup code and we get this.

This is from http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=7022 which is an 80's shoutcast station Sky.FM.

gecko-mediaplayer and gnome-mplayer 0.9.9

I released gecko-mediaplayer and gnome-mplayer 0.9.9 on 2009-02-05 and the release was decent for the most part. But compile issues where found with various flavors of libxul and there were some other problems with shoutcast and other websites.

So I reworked some code and found some bad problems. So I released a gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.9.1 only on the mailing list which was a snapshot of SVN as of 2009-02-08.

So expect a new release coming soon to fix some of these issues.