Why was the media player downgraded in 2.5?

[punkmaister]

Why on Earth was the up till' now fully featured Media player downgraded in version 2.5?

The media player was just fine as it was with all it;s niceties such as access to control bar functions under full screen. Keyboard shortcuts for frame skip under pause that was available in normal or full screen modes. Now none of that any longer available. Basically and for lack of a better description the built in media player just sucks now!

So the questions are why and what for? What is the goal here? To remove the media player entirely? Please tell me this isn't so! But if not why downgrade what was such a great media player in the first place? To what end? And finally is the fully featured media player going to be restored? If so when? At what Build exactly will the good Ol' player be available again?

[mojo85]

We didn't have the Source Code for the old Media Player ... the current one is a WIP (Work in Progress) which Ryo undertook to rewrite the Media Player code. Seeing by how far it has come so far, this is a good sign. Off course some of the implementations found in the original is not currently in the new one but I'm sure Ryo is working on writing those in as time progresses.

EDIT: As an addition having the source code allows us to compile for 64bit, and track down bugs related to a Media Player failures. I personally would like to see the Visualizations back as I had a couple of great visualizations I was using that didn't come with the installer.

[punkmaister]

[kevogod]

[punkmaister]

[kevogod]

[punkmaister]

[ailurophobe]

I'd guess the devs found it annoying to program around the bugs in old code they have no access to. Technically, there would also be some licensing issues with having closed source components in GPL software. As for why they put the new in before it was 'ready' it would probably be so they could get feedback from users like you. It is pretty difficult to find bugs in software if nobody uses it.

I vaguely recall there was also a reason involving new plugins or plugin APIs, but not being a dev I didn't really pay attention so I could be wrong.

[punkmaister]

[punkmaister]

Just point to one that has once again a fully featured media player and as less bugs as possible just like the finalized predecessors used too...

[ailurophobe]

You shouldn't. I don't. I just try it for myself and then make up my own mind based on my own experience. There is no reason you should trust the quality of any software before you have tried it out for yourself. But seriously I can't recall there ever being a version of Windows that was fully stable on release. And the same is true of most other software. I mean the first thing I do after installing a game is to look for an update because I know, without even looking, that the version I bought has serious bugs and isn't stable enough to even be worth testing.

The part where trust comes in is that you trust, or do not trust, the developers to fix the problems and give you an update for the fixes. Even Microsoft has started giving free service packs instead of requiring people to buy the version that actually works separately later. (Windows 3.1, Windows 95C, Windows 98SE...) So I am not asking you to trust that a major update works right off the start, I am asking you to trust that the developers will fix the problems once they get enough bug reports of the bugs that the beta test was too small to catch. Just for the record: Vista probably had the biggest beta test program ever and came out years late, it still was unusably unstable on release. Just like every other major update of Windows before it. Beta test just are limited in what they can catch regardless of how much money you have.

EDIT: And I am not a Shareaza developer, so the talk about putting the new media player out for wider testing was just a random guess. I doubt it really is the actual reason. More like a guess of why the devs were aggressive in pursuing whatever the actual reason was. 64 bit support maybe? A change in the plugin interface?

[mojo85]

From what I remember and Kevo can fill in the gaps ... Mike (Micheal Stokes) the original coder of Shareaza had his HDD crash on his development laptop ... amongst the lost code was the MediaPlayer ... he had recovered the rest from other backups. This was as Kevo explained during the time Shareaza was closed sourced. He never did get around to re-writing that set of lost code, but re-used the already compiled .dll file because it was the least buggy component of the Shareaza equation ... hence it was low in the priority.

As for including the new instead of the old, well it is the right logical path once the old one has exhausted all it's use, it is time to change things. 64bit compilation, compiling with DEP mode, removal of last Closed Source component, and more. If you insist in having the MediaPlayer of old it can be done ( I think so long as Plugin API hasn't changed). But it can only be available for 32bit version for the reasons already explained.

[ocexyz]

Let it be and stay. PPl can set in settings either to use old one or next one. That was one of best points in Shareaza, New one can't be worse. And become better is a chalange... :mr. green:

[punkmaister]

[punkmaister]

[mojo85]

I have to say Ryo has actually brought this thing along quicker then I have imagined. From the time of removing the old one, almost exactly a year and to what is currently available, things have come together quicker then I imagined. The current code is actually quite usable even if it has some UI quirks, those will definitely be ironed out slowly as time progresses. You may prioritize the MediaPlayer high on your list but for me I want to test 64bit builds and hence I rank that high. I think from a developmental perspective this is the right way forward, we now thanks to Ryo have code for the MediaPlayer, 64bit builds, and a safer Shareaza.

[old_death]

[ocexyz]

[punkmaister]

[ailurophobe]

I think you really are better off just finding an external media player that works for you. The old media player also had bugs in it and since the source was available they were "fixed" by adding workaround code to Shareaza. I think that some of the workaround code might have already been cleaned out as needless. I have been using an external media player for years myself. I see the integrated media player as saving people who have nothing better installed from using WiMP, not as a fully featured media player.

[punkmaister]

[ailurophobe]

I use Media Player Classic because it supports embedded styled subtitles in mkv and ogm containers. (Actually everything is done by external filters, but many players either fail to build the filter chain correctly or use internal filters with serious bugs in them.) Sounds to me that your needs are pretty different from mine though, so, as usual, I can't really help you. (MPC is actually pretty bad as a music player...)

Try to be more optimistic, now that there is a functional media player with source adding the features of the old one is actually relatively easy. All that is missing is developer hours. Sadly those are pretty scarce with few developers and lots of higher priority things to do.

[punkmaister]

[old_death]

Well, if you think so, help us doing something against it instead of posting on hundreds of places in the forums to repeat your opinion again and again and again.

[diztrancer]

OldDeath: now he will answer to you in all threads Long live forum spam !!!

[old_death]

[punkmaister]

OK maybe we can help each other, how about making the old player DLL available for download with an installer that registers it appropriately for those of us that are unhappy with the currently downgraded player. You say is more stable, personally the old media player never crashed on me. The main application did for other reasons but never the media player. I still think the old player should have been kept up till the new one was up to par with the old one to ensure a seamless transition. It is my understanding that one has to save all relevant data separately when installing Debug builds does this entail the same process they gave me if I were to downgrade back to 2.4 or does another totally different process apply?

[ailurophobe]

Not sure what exactly you are talking but I'll answer anyway and hope it is useful to you. The reason you need to save your files when going debug is that there might be changes that make the files incompatible with the older stable version. It is the exact same issue as between 2.4 and 2.5, but since people are generally more likely to go back from a debug build it is specifically mentioned in advance. So going back from debug to 2.4 is not any more difficult than from 2.5. Not sure if there are any trouble going back to 2.5. Most work after 2.5 has been bug fixing, so I'd guess there are no file format changes. Unless there was a bug in the file format. Also since the changes are mostly bug fixes, the current debugs are much more stable than debug builds usually are. Potentially better than the 'stable' version. So at the moment going debug really only costs you the extra performance hit from better error checking that running a debug build always seems to cause.

Incidentally, the help and support forum has traditionally run on a user-to-user basis (I don't really have a real connection with the project either), so if you see someone posting a problem you think you can help with feel free to do so. Two involuntary forum migrations have kind of put a damper on people, but Shareaza forums used to be a really friendly and helpful place. So trying to help people is never the wrong thing to do in here IMHO. ( <- In response to your post in another thread.)