Some people seem to want to try beta-components of the tree, but don’t know how to install them… Theres instructions in one of the other forums telling you how to use the Network kit, so heres ones for the Media kit.
Obtain the latest built sources - either build them yourself or use the build factory. If you are building the tree, use the --include-gpl-addons tag to add support for AC3 decoding
Zip up the following BeOS system binaries:
/boot/beos/system/add-ons/media/mixer.media_addon
/boot/beos/system/add-ons/media/multi_audio.media_addon
/boot/beos/system/lib/libmedia.so
/boot/beos/system/servers/media_server
/boot/beos/system/servers/media_addon_server
/boot/beos/bin/desklink
/boot/beos/preferences/Media
/boot/beos/preferences/Sounds
In their place, put the Haiku mixer.media_addon and multi_audio.media_addon; the Haiku libmedia.so; the Haiku media_server and media_addon_server; the Haiku desklink and the Haiku Media and Sounds panels.
In the /boot/beos/system/add-ons/media folder, copy the Haiku plugins directory. This will give you a /boot/beos/system/add-ons/media/plugins folder containing all the plugins
If you don’t want the media_server and media_addon_server appearing the in Deskbar as running applications, right click on them, go to Filetypes, and change their app flags to “Background App”. You have to do this one by one, not at the same time.
If you use an EMU10K1 soundcard, it would be advisable to remove Be’s emu10k1.media_addon and EMU10k1 driver, and replace the driver with Haiku’s emuxki driver, as you will now get multi channel support.
Reboot the computer
You won’t hear bestartup.wav playing on boot, so try playing a file to ensure the kit works. If it does, check the File Info in MediaPlayer to make sure its using the Haiku decoders.
Functionality wise, you’ve lost media encoding, system sound events, RealPlayer and SoundPlay 4.9.x. Corum III and Civ:CTP no longer work either, although this might be down to the game kit, I’ll have to check. You can bodge them into working, however, by providing each of them with a copy of R5’s libmedia.so in their own lib/ folders.
You can use VLC, MediaPlayer, Corum III, CDBurner, etc. just as well as before. CDBurner can now reliably convert from Ogg Vorbis when burning to CD. You can play MPEG family, Theora, Cinepak and Sorenson video, amongst other types, and RAW, MP3, Vorbis and Speex audio in .mp3, .avi, .ogg, .mpc, .wav, .au and .aiff file containers. Note that the MP3 decoder cannot yet handle MP3 audio inside AVI files produced by ffmpeg, and that many containers do not support seeking, yet.
If you get a crash, GET A STACK CRAWL. Always useful for the developers to have. Marcus will probably appreciate it.