call for a new visual

did a limited search in the wish list forum and didn't find anything, but I have an idea for a visual that I would love to see, anybody that uses Xmms surely has seen the DiscoTux visual on there, a tiny little box that has tux and his head and feet move to the beat, and the background flashes colors.

perhaps this is something that could be done for the empeg, talk to the author and gain his permission to re-use the idea for the empeg. I love that visual when I'm on linux, so I'd love to carry it over to the empeg.

Eli

Yea, that'd be pretty cool.

What would even be better is a tool to somehow easily convery XMMS or WinAMP visuals into the format for the empeg

while yes that would be cool, visuals aren't something that can be added willey nilley by users, they're included in the kernel builds. I heard that they were working on making the visuals a seperate package that could be added, but I think that it's one of those features that has been "coming soon" for quite a while now. it would be nice though.

eli

Lies!

The visuals are not included in the kernel. They are not even included in the player. They come from a completely standalone binary (visuals.bin), and multiple binaries can even be referenced by visuals.list. However the player-visuals interface is still subject to change and nobody has had the time to extend this to a proper API.

I agree that in time it would be great to have an interface that everybody can use to create their own visuals.

Toby

crap, I knew I should have kept my filthy mouth shut.

it'd be great to have an API, but I'd settle for disco tux for now ha ha ha, any other interest in this from anybody else?

The problem with porting the WinAMP plugins to the Empeg is that most of the visuals, at least for windows, extensively and nearly exclusively, use DirectX or OpenGL for hardware rendering and exceleration. I highly doubt anything could be done to do this sort of thing with the Empeg. The hardware engine just isn't there. And I'm also pretty sure that most of the WinAmp plugins use fucntions that arn't as simple to do with integer based Arm.

Perhaps somebody could ask nullsoft nicely for snippet of visualization source? Especially since Winamp 3 will be available for Linux. Xmms also has a OpenGL visualization plugin that could theoretically be ported

And you're going to do GL without floating point math?

Hey, I say leave the empeg visuals to Toby for now (and just beg him for occassional new features ). When and if there's a published API, people can (try to) port whatever they wish.

Bruno

Yeah, don't see how Winamp visuals could work on a 128x32 4-color screen. Toby has to do a lot of work to get them to look good within those restrictions. WinAmp visuals assume high rez and high color, and most of them would look like utter crap if just run straight on the player's screen (even if you could port them which you can't).

Now that you mention it.... err no

That's why this is a wishlist and not something already included :P

Heh.

Does the HSX box have visuals?

Calvin

yes

Are they higher resolution color visuals? Same ones on the empeg but higher res and colored? :-D

Calvin

The HSX does not have color. However it does have more shades of gray.

There are fewer visuals on the HSX than on the car player, but the ones it has are ported over from the car player. So you will see some higher-rez versions of some old familiar favorites.

heh heh, hate to cancel this great discussion, but this thread was originally about just me wanting to have the Xmms "DiscoTux" visual on the empeg, and it kind of got carried away.

so....anybody else crazy for that funky discoTux?

eli

Not strictly true - it also has some original visuals which would not really work on the car player display. Examples are the Moire patterns and the bouncing 3D cube thing.

Rob

Examples are the Moire patterns and the bouncing 3D cube thing.

I thought those were just more-detailed variants of Grampian/Hercynian/Caledonian and BorgBeat?

I do admit, the cube on the HSX is pretty cool. It's like BorgBeat on the empeg, but its faces have a symmetrical version of the Grampian/Hercynian/Caledonian thing running on them. It's nice to have more shades and a higher rez.