Media Kit Howto

[myob]

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.

[admin1]

i’m gunna post this as a newbie help file (with an advanced warning of course) because i think enough people will want to try this

[myob]

Go ahead. Public Domain text

We need a wiki here…

[admin1]

ya a wiki might be a good idea…

another on the list of things for me to do, heh

[atomozero]

http://wiki.bebits.com/page/UsingOpenBeOSMediaKit

to use this?

[myob]

BeBits WIKI is not good enough

I wrote that article on the BeBits WIKI anyway.

[admin1]

i’m not realy experienced with wiki sites… but i don’t think it would be horribly hard to write one that could be useful to us

hopefully i’ll have some free time today maybe and i can get a working prototype

oh ya, what features do we need?

[myob]

Argh - writing one good could take you ages

Take a look at MediaWiki - it looks good (very good) and does virtually everything possibly needed. Its GPL though…

[Bdragon]

kurtis wrote:

i'm not realy experienced with wiki sites... but i don't think it would be horribly hard to write one that could be useful to us

hopefully i’ll have some free time today maybe and i can get a working prototype

oh ya, what features do we need?

Kurtis, here’s a nice wiki engine written in PHP. Should be pretty easy to roll the haiku style into it.

PhpWiki

Writing your own wiki is counterproductive, there are numerous opensource engines available in just about every language.

[myob]

PhpWiki and UseModWiki aren’t… all that good

I spent a lot of time chosing something suitable for a collabartice Knowledge Managment System and went with my own minorly haxored MediaWiki. Its the best, by far. Looks the best, works the best, installs damn easily on a UNIX system (and damn badly on Windows…). Its GPL though…

[Kev]

Since the bug-reporting thing is busted, I guess I’ll post here…hopefully Marcus or Andrew will see it.

1. It works! Woohoo! Now I can play oggs on the MediaPlayer! On my PII 450, it’s only using 5-6% of the CPU while playing on the oggs I tried.

but…

2. The sound’s all weird no matter what type of file (well, I only had oggs and wavs on hand). It’s pretty choppy and/or you can hear a repeated low “dotting” in equal or better proportion to however loud the bass part is in a song or sound, even in BeBeep.wav. Although this adds a really neat growly edge to the techno of my Brave Saint Saturn songs, mostly it just sounds bad.

3. The media prefs’ real-time option doesn’t stick nor seem to have an effect. Also, if I try toggling it while MediaPlayer is open (playing or not), it won’t play again until you restart the player, but also, the preflet crashes when you close it (but only if the player was open at the time of toggling and restarting the servers):

loading symbols
segment violation occurred
global destructors keyed to __dont_remove_copyright_from_binary:
GLOBAL.D.__dont_remove_copyright_from_binary:
+0028 ec518e48: *000000a091bf0f movsx 0x000000a0(%ecx), %edx
Media:sc
frame retaddr
fd000764 ec503733 ._init + 00000dd2
fd000784 ec532690 ._fini + 00000017
fd000790 ec083eed call_routine_in_order + 0000016d
fd001bf8 ec0842a5 call_term_routines + 00000019
fd001c0c ec04a9ca exit + 0000009a
fd001c20 80009602 _start + 0000006e
Media:

I’ve got a Turtle Beach Montego II (which comes up in BeOS as Vortex-2) and 384 MB of RAM if that helps at all. Sound is not choppy at all under normal production circumstances in R5.0.3 so long as I have the real-time option enabled, otherwise it’s sometimes skippy.

Anyway, rock on!

Kev

[Kev]

Sorry, forgot this: I also couldn’t open either of the .mov files I have. The one it complained about the codec on (A Glitch in the Matrix–too new?) and the other one it opened, set the ending looper bracket to about 5% of the way into the movie, and there was a tiny bit of sound (0:00:00:78’s worth, apparently) before it (MediaPlayer) froze with a pegged processor and had to be killed.

Kev

[myob]

Kev wrote:

Sorry, forgot this: I also couldn't open either of the .mov files I have. The one it complained about the codec on (A Glitch in the Matrix--too new?) and the other one it opened, set the ending looper bracket to about 5% of the way into the movie, and there was a tiny bit of sound (0:00:00:78's worth, apparently) before it (MediaPlayer) froze with a pegged processor and had to be killed.

Kev

Movs aren’t supported yet, at all.

[myob]

Kev wrote:

Since the bug-reporting thing is busted, I guess I'll post here...hopefully Marcus or Andrew will see it.

1. It works! Woohoo! Now I can play oggs on the MediaPlayer! On my PII 450, it’s only using 5-6% of the CPU while playing on the oggs I tried.

but…

2. The sound’s all weird no matter what type of file (well, I only had oggs and wavs on hand). It’s pretty choppy and/or you can hear a repeated low “dotting” in equal or better proportion to however loud the bass part is in a song or sound, even in BeBeep.wav. Although this adds a really neat growly edge to the techno of my Brave Saint Saturn songs, mostly it just sounds bad.

3. The media prefs’ real-time option doesn’t stick nor seem to have an effect. Also, if I try toggling it while MediaPlayer is open (playing or not), it won’t play again until you restart the player, but also, the preflet crashes when you close it (but only if the player was open at the time of toggling and restarting the servers):

loading symbols
segment violation occurred
global destructors keyed to __dont_remove_copyright_from_binary:
GLOBAL.D.__dont_remove_copyright_from_binary:
+0028 ec518e48: *000000a091bf0f movsx 0x000000a0(%ecx), %edx
Media:sc
frame retaddr
fd000764 ec503733 ._init + 00000dd2
fd000784 ec532690 ._fini + 00000017
fd000790 ec083eed call_routine_in_order + 0000016d
fd001bf8 ec0842a5 call_term_routines + 00000019
fd001c0c ec04a9ca exit + 0000009a
fd001c20 80009602 _start + 0000006e
Media:

I’ve got a Turtle Beach Montego II (which comes up in BeOS as Vortex-2) and 384 MB of RAM if that helps at all. Sound is not choppy at all under normal production circumstances in R5.0.3 so long as I have the real-time option enabled, otherwise it’s sometimes skippy.

Anyway, rock on!

Kev

BeBeep.wav uses MS-ADPCM, which is not properly supported yet. The other issues are, well, a bit weird

[Kev]

So real-time is implemented, then? Hmm…

Kev

[myob]

Kev wrote:

So real-time is implemented, then? Hmm...

Kev

Sorry, didn’t notice that question

I THINK so. There is some file caching that may be enabled/disabled by it. I’m not sure.

[tb100]

How recent is your media kit build?

On October 24, Marcus commited a change to the CVS with the following comment:

Quote:

Completed implementation of chunk caching. Playback from harddisk is now much better, crackling should be gone.

There’s a new alpha release on the way soonish so hopefully that will work better for you.

Simon

[Kev]

I got it from the factory yesterday. IIRC in an about dialog somewhere it said it was from the 25th. I look forward to this alpha.

Kev

[myob]

tb100 wrote:

There’s a new alpha release on the way soonish so hopefully that will work better for you.

My entire Howto is based on the assumption that you’re using the latest CVS builds

the last alpha doesn’t even let VLC run right its so old.