MacFormat 1994 November/macformat-018.iso/Comms Spectacular/mosaic/Helpers/Sparkle202 Folder.1/Docs/New in 2.02

Text File | 1994-04-11 | 10.8 KB | 185 lines | [TEXT/ALFA]

What's new in 2.02?
• Compiled with gBreakFailure switched off. Damn. Damn. Damn.

What's new in 2.01?
• Implemented padding YUV macroblocks with a repeat of the last value of
     each YUV triplet when macroblocks at the edge of a frame spill over
     the edge. The most common case of this is a 120 pixel high movie with a
     macroblock height of 128. In the past this spillover was filled randomly.
     The result of this is that MPEGs created are about 15% smaller.
• Some diddling with the code used by the IDCT algorithm gives a speed boost
    of about 5% to both playing and encoding MPEGs.
• Fixed a serious bug that prevented you from playing an MPEG if you started
    playing    it then interrupted it. A nice byproduct of this is that I got
    jogging of MPEGs fully operational. You can now repeatedly view a section
    of the MPEG by hitting command-right-arrow then command-left-arrow to keep
    the MPEG moving forwards then backwards.
• Altered the alert popped up when the Thread Manager is not present to make
    it more palatable to corporate and institutional users.
• Fixed the MPEG buffering which would give problematic results for very small
    MPEGs (say three frames or less).
• Finally went through all resources, marking them purgable or not and removing
    the unnecessary ones.
• Fixed the "PBBIBB" default frame set to make it correspond to the user view
    of things, not my programmer's view.
• Fixed a bug that prevented a temporary movie created by the movie controller
    handling an MPEG file from being destroyed.
• Fixed two bugs in the Think Class Library dealing with the loading of dialogs
    then manipulating them without setting their memory blocks to non-purgable.
• Fixed a long-standing bug in the MPEG player buffer-handling code that
    would cause the MPEG frame index to be incorrect if it was created while
    memory was short. This probably never caused problems except for very long
    MPEGs.
• When converting a QT movie into a different movie form, the dialog that comes
    up asking you for compression options will have the frame rate and key
    frame rate set at what the original movie used, sparing you from having to
    guess. I will eventually have this working across all file conversions,
    not just movie-->movie.
• The Think C 6 compiler contains a bug when performing code-motion optimization
    on complex loops. If you run through the assembly it produces in this case,
    it performs some very nifty register coloring and creating induction
    variables for the loop. It then leaves out one crucial instruction to
    update one of the induction variables each pass through the loop and so
    the code is garbage.
    As far as I can tell, this only affects one function in my code and I have
    used a #pragma there to prevent it happening, but the fact that bugs like
    this exist in the compiler is a little worrying.
• Revised all memory allocation so that it is more likely to not to use up all
    memory reserves and leave nothing for toolbox.
• Found an especially nasty bug involving grabbing frames from a QT movie
    which, when memory ran low, would leave the system GrafPort/GDevice
    environment in an inconsistent state.
• Revised all uses of GWorld to use tempMem, but fallback to local heap if
    tempMem is unavailable.
• Altered the strings used to popup error messages at startup if QuickTime
    is not available. These got mixed up when I moved code around.
• The code to build the MPEG index when an MPEG is opened would run out of space
    when a very large MPEG was opened---one of a thousand frames or more. Now
    memory is allocated for this a little more flexibly.
• Fixed a bug I inserted when I changed from Sparkle 1.6 to 1.7. I rewrote the
    Berkeley motion vector code to speed it up and in the process made one
    little typo, shifting a variable right by 1 not 2. The effect of this, in
    Sparkles 1.7 and 2.0 was that, under very rare occasions, blocks of color
    would appear a few pixels off from where they should be. The only place I
    ever saw this was three or four frames of the MPEG sales110.mpg.
    This is not related to a separate problem.
    The motion estimation code in the MPEG encoder (at present the Berkeley code
    with practially no changes) is not perfect. It sometimes creates
    blocks that appear to be wildly off from where they should be (by quite a few
    pixels). This is not very obvious in real life, but is very obvious in animation.
    This is largely a quantization artifact---it goes away if you lower the
    quantizations. But obviosly you don't want to do that always, just where
    necessary, so you really want a smarter quantizer that is adaptive.
    I'll work on issues like this as soon as I can.
• When converting a movie with sound to MPEG or QT, occasionally pops of sound could
    be heard. This is fixed.
• When converting movies with very low keyframe rates (say 20 or more dependent
    frames per keyframe) occasionally the display of the movie would get confused
    and appear to alternate between two different frames. This is fixed.
• The TCL does a very naughty thing in dealing with memory shortages by calling
    Failure() which means traps that fail memory requests are left in an
    inconsistent state. I changed this behavior to something more friendly.

What's new in 2.0?
• The structure of the code has been completely altered to be based on
    threads. This makes it much easier for me to add new features to the code
    while having it retain MultiFinder friendliness.
• Now opens and plays QT movies.
• Now can create MPEG files. General conversion from
     {QT or MPEG}--->{QT or MPEG} is possible.
• Many minor changes to the way files are opened, named and such.
• Makes minor use of the speech manager if installed.
• You can now play MPEGs backwards.

What's new in 1.71?
• The progress bar now updates itself properly at the very end of saving
    each frame to Quicktime. It also draws itself better on b/w screens.
• More of the default QT movie player keystrokes now work.
• The app notes if an MPEG file has many errors and if so warns you that
    it has probably been transferred to the mac incorrectly.
• I have incorporated a workaround to make Sparkle work with the QT VM
    extension. However I do not recommend you use the two together. If you do
    use QT VM you will find Sparkle's memory usage a little less efficient
    than without using QT VM. This is because of the way QT VM works.
• Fixed a bug that caused unusually sized MPEGs to display as distorted.
• Sparkle should now cope a little better with low memory situations.
• Added a small tweak to improve drawing on 16bit screens under low
    memory conditions.
• Uses the most recently released version on the floating windoid.
• I have learned of an app that will convert QT to MPEG on the mac. It's
    not the easiest thing to use and I recommend this only for people
    who really need this, not for people who just want to play around.
    See the README file for details.

What's new in 1.7?
• Opening files is much faster.
• Fixed the size of the checkboxes in the Open File dialog to the correct
    size for all those millions of people who use Chicago as their system
    font cause they have no sense of aesthetics. Oops.
• Now when Sparkle changes the file-type of an file, the Finder will update
    the icon immediately, instead of forcing you to open and close the
    folder to see a new icon. Thanks to Jamie McCarthy for telling me how
    to do this.
• Added an "About Sparkle" dialog box to quieten the constant stream of
    complaints about this.
• Changed the way progress is reported. I think the new scheme feels
    rather more elegant. (If you have a fast machine and only use small
    MPEGs, you may not notice this change much.)
• Adde random access. You can now use the step backward stepper, or
    simply click in movie controller where you want to go. All standard
    movie controller clicks and keystrokes are supported.
• Restructured the internal code vastly. This is what took most of the
    time and while it doesn't directly help you users, it gives me
     a framework that's much easier to build on. For example it should be
     trivial to add Apple Event support when I get round to that.
• Three or four minor bugs were squelched, mostly involving Sparkle crashing
     when it encountered MPEGs with invalid data in them.
• Now quits gracefully when started on a 68000 mac like a Classic, rather
    than crashing. I'm sure    lots of people care about this.
• Added better multi-tasking support. This takes two forms.
    One is that the length of the timeslices Sparkle uses before giving up
    the CPU are now absolute times.  Before they were numbers that worked
    well for my SE/30, but probably not optimally for slower or faster
    machines.
    The second is that you can now context switch out of Sparkle while it
    is doing slow QT conversions (especially converting to Compact Video).
    The way I have implemented this is not wonderful, but the best I can
    do given the present way the code is structured. The next version
    will use the Thread Manager and will do this rather better.
    This second form of timeslicing is done through the
    SetSequenceProgressProc() call which is new in QT1.6 and which is why
    I now require use of QT1.6. Also QT does not yield the CPU very often,
    and (as far as I know) there is no way to make it yield more often.
    So while your machine is no longer completely frozen as it does its
    conversion, it's still not too pleasant to use for typing. I can't do
    much about this---complain to Apple and tell them to change this part of
    QT, or better yet the whole OS.

What's new in 1.6?
• I became tired of continually having to explain to people about mac
    file types, so I wrote a file filter function for the Open File dialog
    box which displays ALL files with a .mpg suffix. This should make use a
    lot easier for novices.
• Fixed a bug that involved writing to NULL.
• Fixed a bug that prevented IBP type MPEGs from rewinding when they
    reached the end and the play button was hit twice.

What's new in 1.5.2?
• I was disposing of a handle twice (specifically I was disposing of a
    pixmap and then its colortable, not realizing that DisposPixMap took
    care of the colortable for me.) Thanks to Dan Sears for pointing this out.
    I never noticed a problem due to this bug, but it's probably good to
    have killed it.

Whats new in 1.5.1?
• One part of my speed optimizing code was not being initialized properly.
    This caused a very specific type of MPEG file to show parts of its first
    frame as greenish blobs. Now fixed.
• The code to detect errors in a corrupted MPEG file has been made even
    more robust. Substantially better recovery from such errors, by
    rebuilding the lost parts of a frame from the previous frame, has been
    introduced. Thanks to a wonderfully corrupt MPEG file I pulled off
    usenet with about 15 misc errors in it for pointing out new and
    ingenious ways to fail.
• New icons, courtesy of Richard Lim in Britain. I hope you like them.
    You will have to rebuild the desktop to see them.