Lex Spoon wrote:

>Jason Dufair <jase at dufair.org> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I am finding as I'm playing on Linux tonight that mpeg stuff is 
>>noticably slower than Windows, even on an arguably faster machine 
>>(Celeron 400 vs. PII 300).  There is a new version of libmpeg with 
>>buffered I/O that I'm tempted to try out.  If I am successful, is there 
>>any reason not to use it?  Also, do we really have to keep out the CSS 
>>stuff?
>>
>
>Squeak is currently using a custom modification of some mpeg library we
>got from... somewhere.  If you want to update MpegPlugin to use a more
>standard MPEG library, without needing any modifications, that would be
>excellent!
>
FWIW, the libraries are Heroine Virtual's (the creators of the excellent 
Broadcast2000, amongst other things).  I think the library is quite 
fine, having become pretty familiar with it when I added the ability to 
play mp3 files with id3v2 tags.  There are a few other libraries that 
one could argue are more "standard", but I think the one we have seems 
to be well written.  The newer versions of the library (found at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/heroines/) have some nice file I/O 
buffering which should go a long way toward helping with the performance 
issues I experienced on my Linux box.  I don't believe many of the 
interfaces have changed much, so I may play with updating that soon.

(Referencing your earlier email) I think putting the id3 support right 
in MPEGFile makes great sense, Lex.  I'll plan on adding it there.  I'm 
not sure how the whole module thing works WRT weekend hackers (like 
myself) when it comes to modifying existing classes, but I'll just code 
it up and we can work out those details later.

>CSS logalities are really confusing.  Does anyone know it's current status?
>
I suppose we can just leave it in but not provide a primitive (which is 
what I believe we do now).  Lest Squeak get in the spotlight for the 
wrong reasons.  Then again, they say any press is good press.  It 
certainly doesn't seem to hurt Eminem too much :-)

-- 

Jason Dufair - jase at dufair.org
http://www.dufair.org/
"A laugh for for the newsprint nightmare
A world that never was
Where the questions are all 'why?' and
The answers are all 'Because'"
-- Bruce Cockburn