@ChrisH

Quote:

Actually it's a bug in the 3rd party libdvdcss-based plugin for DvPlayer, not within DvPlayer itself. The official DVD plugin that comes with DvPlayer works, but it cannot handle encrypted DVDs. I'm sure a fix for the 3rd party plugin will come soon, as I heard the same bug was already fixed in mplayer, which uses the same libdvdcss code.

Regarding playback speed of DVDs. The 667MHz Sam440 is definitely capable of it even in pure software. We're not quite there yet, but it's damn close, and sooner or later we should get things optimized. The current OS4 SDK cannot generate code optimized for the 440EP yet, so essentially when you're playing a video on the Sam with DvPlayer, you have the Sam440 running code (for both DvPlayer and avcodec.library), which is optimized to achieve the best possible speed on a G3/G4 CPU that has a very different architecture. So you're currently not seeing the true power of that CPU.

@salass00

I would say there are more important missing features in OWB yet than this

@nubechecorre

It looks like the main page does not load completely, if you look at the progress bar.

@xeron

You don't necessarily need the sources of OWB to help out joerg with its development, there are many things that could be made by other developers (such as a download manager program, etc.) which could be developed separately and then be sent to joerg so he can integrate it into OWB. But whatever you decide to do for it, make sure you discuss with joerg in advance (e.g. to agree on some interface/API), so that it can be integrated with OWB without too much difficulty, etc.

@samwel

Or someone could make a Reaction-based Prefs GUI for joerg, so he can integrate it into OWB. The problem is that right now the options are changing so frequently that it'd be a lot of work to keep updating a Prefs GUI all the time, whereas with tooltypes it's not much effort.

@joerg

Quote:

In that case the glyph widths should be rounded to the nearest integer IMHO. I don't know exactly how it is on other systems, but I'm typing this in Firefox on WinXP and the distance between the characters is perfectly even. Also the font appears to be arranged so that the lines making up the characters are exactly 1 pixel wide and are pixel-aligned so that they don't blur.

I had a play with this version, and it's incredible! It is such a huge leap forward, the speed of it is unbelievable, scrolling is fast and smooth both on Sam440 and uA1, and pages load quick. It's amazing to see that browsing modern webpages can be done at such speeds on hardware of this class like what we have now and it really shows what the Amiga is about. To sum it up:

THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR JOERG, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR THE AMIGA...

Apart from speed, there are also a number of bugs gone, such as the loading of the amigans.net webpage, which on my Sam440 (strangely not on my A1) always appered with the left menubar much too wide, and a question mark shown instead of the PayPal donate button, this happened on all OWB versions from 1.x all the way up to 2.17, but it's gone with 2.18.

I can confirm that the font rendering in this version is not particularly accurate, the gap between the characters is not very even and varies throught the words, even if I type the same caracter many times, the distance between them varies from character to character (just try typing lots of period characters (e.g. .............) in amigans.net when posting here and you'll see what I mean).

GIF anims are still not working, but the strange thing is that when I scroll a page so that the area where a gif anim is has to be redrawn, I can see the frames of the gif anim cycle, so the only issue is that there is no timer-based trigger which makes that part of the webpage periodically refresh.

Apart from that, some important features are still missing, the most important of which for me are:
- file download (hopefully one that can handle simultaneous downloads like IBrowse)
- context menu when clicking right-mouse-button on a URL or image with options like 'Save Target As...', 'Copy URL to clipboard', 'Save Image As...'
- URL history with automatic URL completion when typing in the URL

I already donated for OWB, but I will do it again because this is a project that is definitely worth supporting, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

This version also seems to be pretty unstable here, I get DSI's on a lot of webpages now. Can 2.15 still be downloaded from somewhere? I missed that one, but it'd be good if I could test whether it's more stable here.

@joerg

I didn't know that OWB even supported context menus. I mean, usually browsers give a context menu when you right click on a URL, so that for example you can make a URL open in a new window, or Copy the URL to clipboard, etc. This doesn't seem to work even with OWB 2.14. Especially the "Copy URL to clipboard" functionality would be really useful for me, that is the one I use the most in other browsers.

BTW, when typing a reply here on Amigans.net, it's really slow, I guess due to the "raining" SAM things on the top, which use about 60% or so CPU time, but even with 40% CPU time available typing shouldn't be this low IMHO.

Guys, the current situation is that:

1. The DVD/VCD plugin that comes as standard with DvPlayer does not support css-encrypted DVDs for obvious legal reasons, therefore many commercial DVDs will simply not work with it. You should not get a crash though.

2. The 3rd party plugin based on mplayer's device code and libdvdcss (the one on OS4depot) has some bug, and crashes not only on the Sam, but also on an A1 if you use a debug kernel (which catches some bugs the normal kernel does not). I think the OS4.1 Sam CD contains a debug kernel, because it's beta. Not surprisingly the problem also exists with mplayer itself, and Andrea Palmate' is working on fixing it.

@my_pc_is_amiga

Does it also happen if you disable transparent windows in GUI Prefs?

@Valiant

Yes, as Chapter 4.3 in the DvPlayer manual explains

@TSK

If you are using the original (official) dvdvcd.plugin which comes with DvPlayer then that's normal, encrypted DVDs often have some content, which is not encrypted and will play, but the movie itself won't.

@Hans

That's possible, if the movies are referenced directly by the positino of their blocks on the CD where they begin, in that case you don't actually need them in the filesystem.

@corto

Don't want to disappoint, but DVD menu support is rather low priority on my list, because:

- DVD movies can be enjoyed without the menu
- It is very major effort, giving only a relatively small added value to the program
- Support for other movie formats like FLV/MOV is more sought after by most people and thus has higher priority

However DVD subtitle support has a higher priority, and I do intend to look at that some time in the near future.

@All

Thanks a lot for the nice words

@Mikey_C

You should check if it's only AC3 that does not work, or that you get no sound at all, not even with normal MPEG/AVI files. If you get no sound at all, then you shoudl check your AHI Prefs, and make sure that you have "Unit 0" correctly configured. Some programs use "Music Unit", but DvPlayer uses the device interface of AHI, and that needs "Unit 0" correctly configured.

@All

There's no reason for everyone to register DvPlayer. There's a demo version available from the DvPlayer website as well as OS4Depot. If you like it, then it's worth registering, if it doesn't do what you need, then don't. If something does not play with the demo version, it won't play with the registered version. An exception to this is the OS4 Special Edition that's on the OS4 CD. That one will not play AVI and WMV, only MPEG.

FLV and MOV support is planned, as well as many other things, but it won't happen this year, because it's a lot of work, and I don't have enough spare time for it right now.

Hi Guys,

Yes, you can use PayPal with Reg.net if you specify USD as currency, but if you have any problems please send me an EMail and I'll be glad to help out. I'll probably add an FAQ at some point to make things easier.

Regarding DvPlayer's future, it's still in development, and I've recently added some things, which give a further 10% increase in overall playback speed, but it relies on a feature which is not included in the current 4.1 release (neither for A1 or Sam), so we'll have to wait for an update to 4.1, which hopefully isn't that far away.

@HammerD

Strange that it's not up on Joerg's website yet, and there's no "list of changes" in the readme description neither on Aminet, nor on OS4depot.net.

Hi Wol!

Sorry about not replying sooner. I think I found what you have to do to solve the problem of screens going blank. You should set DISPLAYCHAIN=NO in the tooltypes of ALL your monitor drivers which are in Devs:Monitors/. Please try it, and report back if that solves the problem with screens going blank when you switch to another screen on another gfx card.

Regarding the screen dragging. I remember now that the CV64 had some special capability no other gfxcard had, which allowed for screen dragging. And that is exactly why, when you drag a screen on a CV64, you will only see screens only on that card behind. In case of OS4 however, screen dragging is implemented differently, on system level, so that it works on all graphics cards. However as I explained, intuition does not check which graphics card a particular screen resides on, that is why when you drag a screen on one gfx card, you can see a screen behind it which is on another gfx card. However one of the important features of OS4 screen dragging is that you can actually drag things across between screens. For instance, when you have a DirOpus running on one screen, you can drag that screen down to reveal the Workbench screen behind, and drag icons from the workbench screen across to the DirOpus screen, and DirOpus will list those directories. Or if you have an ASL requester on one screen, again you can drag things into it from the workbench, etc. So if you had Workbench on one gfx card on one monitor, and DirOpus on another gfx card on another monitor, you could not drag across, if screendrag only showed the screens on the same graphics card. So, while I see how this is confusing, if it did not work this way, it would actually limit the usefullness of the system. However I would agree that at least there should be an option to disable this, and if there was proper multi-monitor support in OS4, so that for instance you could drag things across directly from left to right (if you have two monitors side by side), then even an option for this would not be needed.

Btw I forwarded this to the OS4 dev team so hopefully there'll be an improvement in an update in multi-monitor suppor, I think it's an important capability and any improvements in this area would be good.

Edit: In the meantime I found out, that intuition in 4.1 already checks during screen dragging, if a screen is on the same board or not, and will only draw it if it's on the same board. Too bad 4.1 for Classic is not out.

I'll just say, if somebody ports NTFS-3G to OS4, I have some PayPal money standing by...