yellowTAB is currently revamping the media services in Zeta by adding new native CODECs to the Media Kit, and developing a brand new native media player application, code named Champion. This will add native support for common media formats that cannot be currently played in the BeOS platform, as well as high-performance video streaming capabilities to Zeta. Also, TuneTracker will include Zeta in its CD from now on. Elsewhere, a USB mass storage driver for BeOS 5 was released.
Zeta to Get New Media Player and Native Codecs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s definitely good news and show than yT step in the right direction
That driver requires the “USB patch” floating around on BeShare. Without it (and maybe even with it) this driver will not work. The USB Patch is something that seems to have come from a newer version of BeOS (read: beta) such as Dano and is therefore… not guaranteed. The USB Patch failed to work on my own system, and even forced me to remove it in order to be able to boot properly again. Just fair warning 😉
This is nice info. I like the GUI screenshot shown, but I hope it comes with a more “BeOS classic” alternative skin 😉 Or at least something that makes it look like it belongs to the OS is comes with.
Much appreciated is the fact that this is to be native and use the media kit and translation kit. Cheers, Frans!
Ironically, without high bandwidth Internet connections where I live, even a revamped and improved media player will not get me playing more web-content video on my BeOS machine 😉
Will this thing play audio as well as video? Is this a general replacement for the R5 media player?
Good news indeed and hopefully the perfect intro to the next exiting news that’s on its way in the form of Zeta RC3!
That media player is just plain lickable! The person who designs guis for yT deserves a cookie
now if we can make it work with r5.03 we will have it made
I don’t like zeta at all. so i geuss ill be missing out on a lot of things
give me sliding tabs or give me death!
TuneTracker still going?!
Very good. Very professional people when I worked with them back in the day. Glad to see they might still have a platform to continue their offering.
John
It is worth to special methion (as it isn’t clear for submission), that USB mass storage driver isn’t work of YellotTab – this is module by Syarzhuk Zharski, made under BSD license.
YellowTab/Zeta has already its own, different mass-storage driver
This USB mass storage driver is not for R5 only. It works much better under BeOS 5.1 variations, incl. Zeta
SD: Do you think the zeta mass storage usb drive wwould work on pe r5.0.3?
Probably we can discuss your problem with patches by e-mail, write me to imker(at)gmx.li.
Yes this is a “suspicious” software but what can users of R5 do? This is just a try. Many people are happy with this stuff.
2Eugenia. thank you for annoncing my work, but I found it a bit confusing to be in “one boot” with yT. 🙂 I don’t work for yT. Thanks. 🙂
Ups, sorry, my German lessons make me … zZzZ. I meant in “one boat” with yT. Sorry. =-)
I know that you are not working for yT. However, many times we “group” similar news items. For example, I wouldn’t make a whole new story about your driver (no offense). But plugging it as a single sentence on a related topic is a better idea. I made it sure that your driver is for “BeOS 5”, not for Zeta.
>SD: Do you think the zeta mass storage usb drive wwould work >on pe r5.0.3?
No sense at moment. Current version of Zeta’s “driver” is less functional and more buggy (hope it will be easily fixed soon, though) than open-source driver which works, as i said, at both BeOS variations.
Now about your question directly. There are some chances to run Zeta’s driver on R5+USB.patches, but not so big.
Why? According to my experience, you can run under R5 lot of things from earlier Dano/5.1 version (dated by second half of 2000), but same componetns from november 2001 Dano/5.1 (Zeta seems to be based on this later version) – don’t work.
While adding native codecs is a great thing I question the importance of a new mediaplayer. The current mediaplayer is allready working fine, what it lacks is DVD and subtile support. You should focus on that rather than reinventing the wheel.
A mediaplayer doesn’t need skins to become accepted, as a matter of fact the old WMP versions are popular for that reason (and a few others).
And I never really got the idea behind having a seperated movie window and control window. All the newbies I know find that concept confusing, and I myself find it frustrating.
Seriously yT, don’t look so much on other products, look at what you have and make it shine. There’s a lot more things to focus on than a new mediaplayer.
I’ll never get over the fact that Champion is a major brand of dog food in Ireland… hehe, dogfood media player
Its interesting they’re doing codec work on the Dano media kit, it’d seem a little more obvious from a future proofing perspective for them to work on the OpenBeOS media kit. Although it still needs and encoder API and its mixer supports drop/copy conversions only, whereas the Dano kit has a decent enougb linear interpolator.
Seems like Frans has found a new piece of code to play around.
I just hope Refraction doesn’t get delayed because of this.
It’s called 3ivx and it is a native BeOS media codec.
It will play back almost all mpeg-4 streams in AVI and MOV containers (Except for broken XVID streams)
The encoder is also available although currently only 1 application uses the interface.
<Shameless plug>
It is also available for Mac OSX and Windows.
http://www.3ivx.com
Oh ok. I just got the opensource ones wroking. working nicely
Thanks for the info.
i hope it’s better than their audio player ‘jukebox’…
i never could get it to work, always crashed, and you could only play files on a bfs drive…
Hinally yT realised that Media is still more important to it’s future than customising and translating stuff.
I really hope that thay decide to pick up teh idea of supporting HighBandwith media field (DVD authoring, High-bandwith Streaming, real-time media mixing…) since this is the field where elgance and speed (BeOS high points) is appreciated over security and networking (BeOS low points).
please do a good work in integrating ffmpeg on the system level and everyone will appreciate it!
Are there some formats that this would support and not VLC ? AFAIK there are VLC builds for BeOS.
Funny thing is that they are selling Zeta RC2 on German teleshopping for 99€
It clearly shows RC2 on the CD. They must really need the money I guess. I tried installing RC2 on my PC but didn’t get very far, I got to the first icon on the bootscreen when my PC decided to reboot. It can only get better.
Especially the fact of making use of native (and new) translators is a great benefit to Zeta in the ‘Media OS’ Way.
Eugenia forgot to mention a neat feature of Champion: Detractors. If this works ‘as expected’, it saves you time and lots of Drive Space at recording very long Streams directly to disc.
Detractors are not a feature of Champion; they are a feature of the unreleased media kit that yT is redistributing/taking credit for. Their writeup was completely wrong about their purpose — they are not intended to “load one format as if it were another format,” but to combine the functionality of an extractor and a decoder in one component, hence “detractor.” The reason we had to birth that particular monstrosity was to support a binary-only codec release from a Certain Evil Empire that was essentially a black box: a file-reading interface on one side, and decoded output on the other. This didn’t fit the extractor/decoder model used by our other codecs, so this hack was necessary.
Note that none of the new Media Kit features mentioned in that article were added by yT. They were all present in Dano when we packed up shop and left.
> Detractors are not a feature of Champion
Correct. The yT announcement is clear about that, is it not?
> …of the unreleased media kit that yT is redistributing/taking credit for
Pardon me, but where in their writing is yT taking credit for the Media Kit?
The rest of the explanation about detractors was very informative. Thanks!
Koki
Arkay, do you have an SiS-based PC? If yes, that’s the reason it didn’t work. Zeta doesn’t work on most SiS mobos (I have one too and it fails to install).
“Viagra_Transistor” claimed detractors were a Champion feature; I was trying to clear that up. Maybe I went overboard in saying they were taking credit for the new Media Kit features, but they certainly didn’t attribute them. When they say that a feature is “new in Zeta,” I’m afraid that most people will assume that yT implemented it. This rubs me the wrong way, since I implemented most of this stuff (I am happy that people are actually getting to use it; I’d just like to see credit given where it’s due.)
would be great if you put together an article about Codecs and Mediaserver-like services.
> “Viagra_Transistor” claimed detractors were a Champion feature
Sorry. I did miss that post. Viagra_Transistor is wrong, and you are correct (as is the yT writing).
> When they say that a feature is “new in Zeta,”
The yT announcement talks about the “new” media player and the “new” codecs (which are of their making), but nowhere do they say that the media kit is new.
> I’m afraid that most people will assume that yT implemented it.
I am afraid that some people always assume all sorts of things! It is a fact of life. 🙂
> I’d just like to see credit given where it’s due.
Agreed.
Koki
No Eugenia, I have an K8T800 with an Athlon 64. Maybe it just doesn’t like this processor. I tried to install it in Virtual PC on this machine under XP, no luck either. Got stuck after all the icons on the bootscreen showed up. I can install it on Virtual PC under Mac OS X but on my Powerbook that would take many hours so I gave up
If it stops after all icons passed, try next time to load it in SafeMode with BIOS CALLS DISABLED
(press space very fast once bootsreen of BeOS/Zeta appears and go to options there)
What speed is that cpu?