This page describe bug fixes and other user-visible changes in each version released (starting at version 1.0.0.0).

• Fixed bug: In some cases, Xforms used to print some warning messages like:

  In MapColor [flcolor.c 791] ColormapFull. Using substitutions
Failed to share colors. Using Private Color Map

  This is now fixed (Xforms warning messages are not printed anymore).

• Fixed bug: Improved audio/video sync on Solaris x86 with Sun's sbpro audio driver. However, because of limitations in Sun's sbpro audio driver, audio/video sync cannot be perfect. A better synchronization can be achieved with the OSS audio driver.

• Fixed bug: Under Solaris SPARC, Audio ports can now be selected before opening a stream.

• Fixed bug: Elapsed play-time (on left side of slide-bar) is now available even when stream is not seek-able (e.g. when streaming from a pipe).
• New Feature: You can hide/show the Controls by clicking on the Video window.
• New Feature: New choice in the "Framerate & Sync" Options: "Play at nominal framerate" which is the default.
• Fixed bug: Now, when the user selects "Play at specified framerate", the specified framerate is not reset (as it used to be) when opening a new stream.
• Fixed bug: When a Window-ID is specified (with option -W), video is now properly centered in the specified window (used to be displayed at the top-left corner of the specified window).
• Fixed bug: Lip-sync should be better in some cases (to be checked).
• Fixed bug: Improved streaming support. Player works better in streaming situations where the source annot always deliver at the nominal bitrate.

• Fixed bug: A bug was introduced in previous versions that was causing the player to display with a lower framerate than expected, specially on fast systems. Typically, if the CPU power was just enough to play video at the full framerate, the Player was playing at a much slower framerate and was not using 100% of the available CPU. This is now fixed.

• New feature: MpegTV Player 1.0 is not "limited" to 30 second anymore. Player is free for non-commercial use. A new licensing scheme now applies. Please read the new LICENSE file for details. Note: License keys purchased for earlier versions continue to give access to the run-time Player's API.
• Changed API version: Version changed to 4 due to (minor) semantic changes in some commands.
• Changed API: COM_SEEK and COM_END do not change the Player state. In earlier versions, those commands used to change the state to "paused".
• New feature: In mtv, the commands |< (go to beginning) and >| (go to end) now do not change the state of the player, i.e. if player was playing, it continues to play after executing the commands. In earlier versions, those commands used to change the state to "paused".
• Changed: In mtv, the cosmetic aspect of the "Sync" dialog has been improved.
• Changed: In mtv and mtvp, option -n has been removed.
• Fixed (major) bug: Player now takes commands even when stream input is blocked (e.g. no data available on pipe or socket). A small cosmetic bug remains: display is not repainted if the window is obscured while stream input is blocked. In previous versions, player would not take any command when blocked on input.
• New feature: In mtv, new menu item File->Play-from-Stdin. Note: this command works only if Stdin is a pipe, file or socket, not a terminal. Data needs to be available for reading on stdin in order for that to work.
• Fixed bug: In mtv, options -amv-1 and -amb-1 now work, i.e. they keep the current master audio volume/balance settings.
• New feature: In mtv, new menu item Help->License displays the License.
• Fixed bug: Fixed framerate sync. In some cases, like playing at a very slow framerate (e.g. 1 frame/sec), framerate was quite erratic. Now plays at a regular rate, even slow.

• Fixed bug: In front-end mtv, got rid of spurious warning (Warning: Audio disabled) when un-Muting the player.
• Change default: When using an OSS audio driver: Now the default for the volume and balance controls is to be tied to the PCM control, not to the master (mixer) control. Unless otherwise specified with option -amv-1 and -amb-1, the master volume and balance are set to some acceptable values at start-up.
• Fixed bug: When the audio driver not OSS, the player does not set the initial volume and balance values at start-up, unless options -apv or -apb are used. Previous versions had a bug caused by the fact that option -amv was considered to be equivalent to -apv when there was no mixer.
• New feature: When master (mixer) controls are not available, the front-end received a message of type S2A_COM_NO_CONTROLS_SELECT that can be used to disable the master audio control selection.
• Fixed bug: Fixed a bug that was introduced in 1.0.1.8 and could cause the player to abort when closing the audio device.

• New feature: Solaris-sparc and Solaris-x86 versions now support both the OSS audio driver API (/dev/dsp) and the Sun audio driver API (/dev/audio).

  If the device /dev/dsp is found, it is assumed that the OSS API should be used, unless otherwise specified (see environment variable MTVP_AUDIO_API).

  Note that the Solaris-x86 audio driver has a bug that prevents correct audio/video sync. The OSS/Solaris driver v3.8d (dated 3pm July 7 1997 or later) works well. Previous versions of OSS/Solaris are broken.

• New feature: The player (mtvp) now recognizes the following environment variables:
  • MTVP_AUDIO_API = audio driver API
    0 = Sun API, 1 = OSS API
    Default: OSS API if /dev/dsp is found, Sun API otherwise.
  • MTVP_AUDIO_DEVICE_MAIN = name of main audio device
    Default: /dev/audio if Sun API, /dev/dsp if OSS API.
  • MTVP_AUDIO_DEVICE_CONTROL = name of control audio device
    Default: /dev/audioctl if Sun API, /dev/mixer if OSS API.
  • MTVP_AUDIO_DEVICE_ULAW = name of ulaw audio device (default /dev/audio).

  MTVP_AUDIO_API is available only on systems supporting several different audio drivers (e.g. Solaris). It is ignored on systems that support only the OSS API (e.g Linux).

  All those environment variables are ignored on Irix systems, because the SGI audio API does not use /dev/... device descriptors.

• New feature: The Irix version of the player (mtvp) now recognizes the following environment variable:
  • MTVP_AUDIO_SGI_DELAY_METHOD = method used to compute audio delay
    0 = simple method using ALgetfilled() (default)
    1 = more complicated method using dmGetUST(), ALgetframetime() and ALgetframetime()
    
  The default method seems to work well on most systems. The complicated method may work better on fast systems (it is more accurate, in theory). Please tell us if you see any difference.

• Performance: Irix version is about 5% faster than previous release. Now about 20% faster than SGI's movieplayer on my Indy.

• Bug fixed: In Irix version, changed the Xforms options in mtv to prevent the famous "clipped-menus" bug. Now the options passed by mtv to fl_initialize() are: -visual Default -depth 8. You can change them by recompiling mtv if needed, or overwrite them with mtv option '+' (see mtv -h).

• Performance: Slightly better performances and lower memory usage. Improved Video/Audio sync.
• New feature: In mtv, added warning when the user un-mutes the player while not in Sync mode.

• Performance: The Solaris-x86 version is now about 25% faster on Pentium (compared to version 1.0.1.3). This gain was achieved by compiling mtvp with a Pentium-optimized compiler.
• Added to API: The API package now contains the object libraries for the Solaris-x86 version.

• Bug fixed: Audio/Video sync has been significantly improved on slow systems.
• New feature: The default gamma correction values are now platform dependent. New default values are chosen to match better the type of monitor generally used with each platform.

• Added to API: COM_SEND_GOP_INFOS (int). Parameter must be 0 or 1. This command is used to tell the player whether or not to send A2G_COM_GOP_INFOS messages for each gop decoded while playing.
• Added to API: A2G_COM_GOP_INFOS. Parameter is a structure of type PMP_DATA_GOP_INFOS. This message is sent by the player each time a GOP header is decoded. The message parameter contains all the info found in the GOP header (including the time-code). By default A2G_COM_GOP_INFOS messages are not sent while playing, to avoid unnecessary overhead. This can be changed using COM_SEND_GOP_INFOS.

• New feature: The mtv front-end now requires libforms.so.0.86. The source code of mtv remains compatible with both libforms.so.0.81 and libforms.so.0.86.
• New feature: Socket/pipe support has been improved. In particular, the Player continues playing video even if input is not available from the pipe or socket for short periods of time (e.g. one second). Previous versions of the Player would cause the video to freeze in this case.
• Added to API: COM_VIDEO_FREEZE (int). Parameter must be 0 or 1. COM_VIDEO_FREEZE (1) disabled any display update. COM_VIDEO_FREEZE (0) enables display update (default).
• Bug fixed: Fixed a problem when changing audio quality of streams with audio sampling frequency not supported by the audio driver.

• New feature: Added support for #-comments in mtvp.key file.

• Bug fixed: Added support for env variable MTVP_GET_WINDOW_ORIGIN_METHOD to fix zoom window position problem under xview_3.2p1.3.orig.tar.gz (olwm/olvwm) under Linux.

• Bug fixed: Layer 2 joint stereo audio was not decoded properly.
• Bug fixed: The Linux-specific optimization for audio was accidentally turned off.

• Bug fixed: Audio was bad on the right channel when encoded in Layer 2 joint stereo.
• Bug fixed: The "Unregistered software" warning was displayed when the player had been registered and the key had expired.

• Bug fixed: When player was stopped and FFW was used, the slide-bar was not updated.
• Bug fixed: When player was stopped, seeking did not change the state in the Control's window title to "Paused".
• Bug fixed: Muting the Player was causing problems with streams that have very low audio bitrate (32 Kbit/sec), like those found in http://208.196.157.36/smirror/fusionfilms/. In some cases, up to 20 sec of audio would not play after un-muting. This problem was caused by Player flushing audio packets when muting. Now the behavior of the Player when muting with this type of streams is much better.
• Bug fixed: On Linux, in some cases, after seeking in the last 2 seconds before the end of a stream and playing, audio would not play. This was cause by an incorrect method for triggering audio output: Audio output was triggered only when the audio driver's FIFO was getting full (which in this cases never happened). Now, audio output is also triggered when the input buffer gets empty, which resolves this problem.
• Bug fixed: On Solaris and Irix, Player could sometimes get out of sync when seeking in very low bitrate streams, because of a bug in the usleep() emulation using select().

• Bug fixed: Pausing the Player was causing problems with streams that have very low audio bitrate (32 Kbit/sec), like those found in http://208.196.157.36/smirror/fusionfilms/. In some cases, up to 20 sec of audio would not play after restarting the Player. This problem was caused by Player flushing audio packets when pausing. Now the behavior of the Player when pausing with this type of streams is much better, but a similar problem still exist with mute.
• Change in behavior: Seeking with the slide bar while playing does not cause the Player to go in the pause state, as it used to. Now, once the slide bar is released, the Player returns to playing mode, which is more convenient.
• Change in API: In order to permit the change above, the API behavior had to be slightly modified. Now the A2G_COM_STATE message is received only when the state of the Player changes spontaneously (e.g. the player stops when the end of a file is reached). It is not received when the state changes because a command that causes (or may cause) the state to change was issued. Commands that may change the state are COM_STATE, COM_SEEK, COM_END, COM_CLOSE etc.
• Added to API: A2G_COM_SYSTEMS_END_CODE, sent when a systems-end-code is found.
• Added to API: A2G_COM_VIDEO_END_CODE, sent when a video-end-code is found.

• Bug fixed: Player's window was not resized properly when playing concatenated sequences with different picture size.
• Bug fixed: Player's window was not resized properly when zooming. This problem was accidentally introduced in version 1.0.0.6.

• This version should not be used, because of some serious bugs.

• New feature: mtv option -F[=][<width>{xX}<height>][{+-}<xoffset>{+-}<yoffset>] can be used to set the initial size and position of the control window.
• New feature: mtv option -G[=][<width>{xX}<height>][{+-}<xoffset>{+-}<yoffset>] can be used to set the initial size and position of the Player window. Currently width and height are ignored.

• Bug fixed: Player did not work if maximum depth of TrueColor visual was not a multiple of 8. This was a problem on some SGI systems.
• New feature: env variable MTVP_FULL_COLOR_MAX_DEPTH can be used to limit the depth. By default the Player creates a window with the maximum depth possible in TrueColor visual, up to 32.
• New feature: mtv option -i starts iconic Player controls.
• Change: mtv with no parameter does not open a file browser at startup anymore. To emulate the previous behavior of mtv, just give mtv a directory as parameter (e.g. "mtv .").
• Change: mtv option menu is now active even when no stream is opened.

• Bug fixed: Player's window and icon names were not set properly when video mode was changed.
• Added to API: commands to specify initial position of Player's window.

• Bug fixed: mtv's controls window title used to say "Playing" at startup when no stream was opened.
• mtv was modified to work around an Xform bug that was causing garbled text in alert windows in case of multiple alerts.
• Audio code was optimized, resulting is slight overall performance improvement.

• Bug fixed: a typo in the code was preventing efficient error concealment.
• Bug fixed: sometimes bad images were displayed when using option -S of mtv.
• Player was exiting with an internal error when given an MPEG-2 stream. Now the proper warning is displayed when attempting to play an MPEG-2 stream.