There is a new video of the SkyOS IndexFeeder available on the SkyOS website, which consists of two parts that show how to perform queries for file meta data and file content using the viewer, and how the Open/Save dialog makes use of the IndexFeeder in order to find documents very quickly, regardless of where they are stored.
SkyOS Video: IndexFeeder in Action
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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@SkyOS developers: please use a “standard” codec for your videos. I for one will not download a codec just to view this. You might want to check out Macromedia Captivate – makes a nice flash video that you can put on your site – and it will save you bandwidth.
I have to second this. This should have been either mpeg or plain divx/xvid.
We use this codec because it has the best quality we have seen so far. If you know good tools to convert this video into a mpeg/divx without losing quality and don’t increasing the file size too much, please let me know.
Also, if you use Windows, you can just download the .EXE. If you use Linux you may try the latest MPlayer which should have support for this codec.
If you want the best quality for less bandwidth, the h.264 is your best bet. But you will need a Mac to convert it, the PC codecs are buggy.
How can you play this on a mac?
Hell, you make an alternate OS and don’t care for the other small OSes like OS X, Mac OS, Amiga, BeO &, Zeta. shame on you. use a proper codec!
Here is a quick reencode. No noticable quality difference, a fraction of the size, a stardard codec, and lots of bandwidth to spare. Download and enjoy!
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jlee23/searching2-good.avi
Good video by the way. Cool developments!
This is really slick. The performance seems extremely fast, so I’m curious:
What were the system specs on the machine that produced this? How many files were being searched and how much disk space?
@ddiego:
The video was captured in VMWare running on a:
Intel Pentium M 1.2GHZ Notebook
768 MB RAM
The query ran over 40GB of data, with ~16000 created and indexed SkyFS attributes and a content database with ~95000 words from ~250000 files.
@James Lee:
What tool did you use to reencode the video?
I may use this in future for the videos.
Every time I see the updates on SkyOS I wonder to myself: has this guy nothing else to do besides coding 24/7 ??!??!?
By the way, how is the graphics engine written? Is it a composite engine for future purposes?
And of course, great work Robert!
I can’t play this “standard codec” version. I have WMP10; with codecs from the K-Lite Codec Pack; and I also have QuickTime 7 installed…
WMP gives an error saying it doesn’t recognize the format while QT just plays a white screen.
Is it only one guy?
man He must be good.
Same here. And james Lee’s version doesn’t work either.
The UI may not be perfect, but the most important which is the functionality is there, and it’s great.
I wonder how long will it be until MS or Apple show up with a blank cheque for this guy, if I were the CEO of these companies I certainly would do that.
Keep it up.
If you’d actually looked at the TSCC website that has the codec for download you’d notice a link that says “download the QuickTime codec”. It will bring to a page that will allow you to download the EnSharpen Decoder/Encoder for Quicktime on Mac OS X which supports TSCC.
Oh hmm the TSCC one works fine for me; both the .exe and the .avi its the the MPEG4 re-encode by James Lee which refuses to run for me. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.
Heh, I just did:
mencoder searching2.avi -o searching2-good.avi -ovc lavc -nosound
It is MPEG4 complient video so it will play if you have the DivX, XviD, or generic FFMPEG codec installed.
I have the DivX, 3vix codecs installed; as well as the MPEG4 codec that is part of QT7. Hmm… I’ll go get mplayer for windows and see if that will work with or without the essentials pack.
However, if that encode is not working with just WMP or QT — I don’t think it be a great idea to use it as standard distribution format.
Gspot identifies your encode as FMP4 and requiring a codec other than the ones included in the standard DivX; 3viX; Xvid packages found on their respective websites. However it works fine with mplayer…
Who cares if you want to get the codec or not. He gave everyone a link, what is the problem.
“I wonder how long will it be until MS or Apple show up with a blank cheque for this guy, if I were the CEO of these companies I certainly would do that. ”
Not to put down the SkyOS guy down, but Apple already does all this in Tiger so I wouldn’t expect anything from them.
And well for MS well NIH Syndrome should keep them from it also.
When will you release SkyOS? When will SkyOS begin to live officially, so that other people apart from osnews reader will know that such a nice OS exists?
I’m not a beta tester but It seemed to me that apart from Firefox, Thunderbird, Abiword, Gimp and Blender not much software exists for SkyOS.
SkyOS looks really nice, but I personally think that time has come to really startup the whole thing. I have the feeling that you guys are working really hard on this project, but there is nothing really visible!
It seemed to me that the development stalled a little bit…
I don’t want to start a flame war, I just think that It would be nice to show SkyOS to the world!
Big respect to the SkyOS team!
We are beginning to work on some big plans behind the scenes, currently. Nothing we can make public yet of course, but we are very excited to begin work on them. In the meantime, Robert continues to fill SkyOS’s feature set out as much as possible.
New MEncoder versions use the FMP4 FourCC for the FFmpeg MPEG-4 codec by default. If you just change the FourCC to DX50 or XVID (absolutely trivial – there are many simple tools to change these 4 characters in the file or you can even directly tell MEncoder to encode the file with that FourCC), you’ll be able to play it also in Windows using DivX or XviD codecs.
Also, you could get much better results with MEncoder if you added more specific -lavcopts (you don’t get good results with the default options, that is without specifying anything).
To all: there’s no such thing as “DivX video” or “XviD video”. DivX, XviD, FFmpeg MPEG-4, 3ivx, Apple MPEG-4, Nero Digital etc. etc. are all MPEG-4 codecs, i.e. they encode and decode MPEG-4 video. It’s MPEG-4 video (usually in the AVI container, so it’as AVI/MPEG-4).
“We use this codec because it has the best quality we have seen so far.”
Like other people already said, you can re-encode the file to MPEG-4 at 1/4 or 1/5 of your original filesize and it will still look great.
[i]”I wonder how long will it be until MS or Apple show up with a blank cheque for this guy, if I were the CEO of these companies I certainly would do that. ”
Not to put down the SkyOS guy down, but Apple already does all this in Tiger so I wouldn’t expect anything from them.
And well for MS well NIH Syndrome should keep them from it also.[i]
I am not saying the reason why MS or Apple would hire this guy is to put SkyOS stuff directly in their products, but for pure talent reason, someone so skilled is a huge asset for any company.
About the NIH syndrome, I have no clue what you’re talking about. MS might be “bad” or whatever you think, but they’re never afraid of hiring talented developers, no matter the background, they hired Daniel from Gentoo and Jim from IronPython, just to name 2.
D***, wrong tag..here is goes again:
“I wonder how long will it be until MS or Apple show up with a blank cheque for this guy, if I were the CEO of these companies I certainly would do that. ”
Not to put down the SkyOS guy down, but Apple already does all this in Tiger so I wouldn’t expect anything from them.
And well for MS well NIH Syndrome should keep them from it also.
I am not saying the reason why MS or Apple would hire this guy is to put SkyOS stuff directly in their products, but for pure talent reason, someone so skilled is a huge asset for any company.
About the NIH syndrome, I have no clue what you’re talking about. MS might be “bad” or whatever you think, but they’re never afraid of hiring talented developers, no matter the background, they hired Daniel from Gentoo and Jim from IronPython, just to name 2.
> , a stardard codec,
Hmm quite not that standard, you used the ‘FMP4’ one, that is the ffmpeg-specific 4CC for mpeg4.
For those who don’t get that one playing (VLC too old, …) just swap the 2 occurences of “FMP4” with “DIVX” in the first sector of the file.
Man, that video surely is impressive. The whole thing is damn fast!!! And if I understand correctly, you guys managed to achieve such speed inside VMWare?!?!? I also liked the way how the search engine was built inside the Open dialog: you can search for files within the Open dialog itself but the option to browse the files is there if you can’t remember exactly what you’re looking for.
The GUI is sexy but there is room to improve. Some widgets don’t look quite right, but other than that there is no complain from where I stand.
The list of programs available could be a little bit bigger, but since one can run Blender, the dynamic duo FF & TB, Gaim, the GIMP and Abiword I’m happy (Even if it kinda makes it some sort of Linux distro and I’m more of a KDE guy… :-))
You guys should create a SDK documentation (including some porting instructions for those “must haves” OSS apps) and push it to your beta testers in order to build a bigger developers ecosystem so that Robert can concentrate more on the OS and leave the applications to his fellow developers.
I’ll look forward for further improvements to this already impressive OS. Congratulations to everyone involved on the making of this thing.
Cheers,
DeadFish Man
Here is a Flash SWF version of the video that weighs in at 3MB. This was created by an employee at TechSmith because they will be releasing Camtasia Studio 3.0 soon, which uses a new Flash compression algorithm that they wanted to take for a test run.
http://www.projectstreamer.com/users/troystein/sky_os/sky_os.html
It looks like Flash SWF is probably the best format for us to use, and we will definitely consider it for the future.
Ok, not to bash you or anything, but come on. It’s not like this is a ceature film, nor is it anything that requires high-end video. Not to mention that MPEG is ample for just about anything you need. This is just a video of what you are doing on the computer, doesn’t even have audio.
Hell, at least WMV is supported in MPlayer, and has a great quality:compression ratio.
This video should play in the latest version of MPlayer.
Additionally, try the Flash link in my previous post.
I don’t use MPlayer, I was just using it as an example.
There are other, much better supported codecs out there that can do the job better than they really even need to.
He is talking about video quality, but this is a computer screen for goodness sakes.
Hey, great video, it looks like you guys impletmented my idea of having tabs in the Skypad. Now I just hope you do it in the file viewer as well. Robert, you are amazing, to be able to hold down a job and develope an OS. Hats off. I can’t wait for the final release of SkyOS so I can get it. Maybe I’ll even buy a beta next winter when I get to Yale, I’m planning on going into computer tech and I’d love to play arround with SkyOS as soon as I have enough bandwidth to download it.
PS I think the high video quality was a good idea. You are obviously running the laptop on a high screen resolution, and if you tried to degrade the video too much no one would know what they were watching….