Progress via Git

I apologies for the lack of updates recently. The current development version of AMPE is very close to 1.0, although it needs a bit more testing before I am prepared to label it 1.0.

One thing I have been working on is getting it to work on platforms other than Windows. The current development version now works flawlessly on Linux as well as Windows. In theory it should just be a matter of recompiling to make it work on Intel Macs as well although I am yet to test that.

Today I am also happy to be announce that we are opening the projects Git repository for public access. This means that at any time you can get the very latest version of the AMPE code via Git. Its a public mirror of the one we use internally so all our updates to AMPE are available as soon as they are commited to our internal repository. This is also means you can easily make your changes and get Git to produces patches which can be emailed to us for inclusion in AMPE. The Git repository is available at:

http://git.kissintelligentsystems.com/ampe.git

To get started cd to the directory you want it downloaded to then:

git clone http://git.kissintelligentsystems.com/ampe.git

This will then download the latest version of AMPE. From then on you can get any new changes by:

git pull

For more information about Git there is a very useful and detailed free book available.

We have just released the latest AMPE SDK. We have decided this version isn't quite 1.0 but its fairly close. There are a few little tweaks we want to make before 1.0.

AMPE has been heavily restructured internally, with all decoding being carried out by decoder plugins. This allows an AMPE app to have support for new codecs to be added at run time after its been installed by the end user. The user simply has to place the plugin in the apps AMPE plugins folder and start/restart the app. The AMPE core will then automatically detect the new plugins and can now use them to decode new types of audio and video streams.

I thought I would just make a quick post about what's happening with AMPE. We are rapidly approaching the 1.0 version of AMPE. This will be the first stable release and will contain a run time plug-in architecture to allow new codecs to be added at run time. So to support new codecs you simply have to drop the plug-in in the applications plug-in directory and start your program.We have also engineered the Ogg – Theora / Vorbis support in to a plug-in, which is part of the main AMPE download.

The API for accessing AMPE 1.0 will be very similar to the existing one . It should take an AMPE 0.5.1 app only about 10 minutes work to convert it to use AMPE 1.0. Under the hood AMPE is very different. The media player class is now independent of the container and codec used. All of the decoding work is carried out by the plugins. Your application will also be able to get a list of file extensions which are supportd at run time, to enable your applications to change their behaviour to match the plugins installed.

One final thing we have decided to switch from LGPL version 2 to LGPL verison 3 for AMPE 1.0. AMPE 1.0 should be released with in a week or two.

We have released a new version of AMPE, version 0.5.1. Its a minor update which includes a few bug fixes and the missing dependencies I talked about in my previous post. Its available form the download section (on the right of this page).

The biggest change is addition of a new sample application. This is a simple audio player. It can play any Ogg Vorbis audio file. Stereo and mono audio files are played as normal, 6 channel files are mixed down to stereo in software. This mixing is experimental at present and is included because support for 5.1 sources in OpenAL is currently windows only (according to the mail list).

Unless the need for another minor release arises, the next version will have some more major changes. These updates are coming about as our content distribution systems media player starts to take shape.

We would be interested to hear any feedback anyone has. Use the email address on the contact page to get in touch (we don't bite).

The current release is missing one dependency to run the sample player. FreeGLUT is used to control the opening of the OpenGL window. We will be making a new release fairly soon. In the mean time the simplest way to get the dependency is to run the Tao Framework SDK installer. This is the library we use to access FreeGLUT in a cross platform way.

You can download it from the Project Page on Source Forge.

UPDATE: Some users have experienced problems with using old graphics card drivers. Updating to the latest drivers from the manufactures site will usually fix this.

KISS Intelligent Systems is currently working on a content distribution platform. As part of that, the client software will include an audio and video player. We have decided to open source the audio and video engine we have developed. This engine is called the Advanced Media Presentation Engine or AMPE for short. Today we are releasing version 0.5. Future versions of which, we will be using as part of our content distribution platform.

The library is designed to be cross platform, however we are only releasing a windows build at this time. The initial version includes support for Ogg files containing Vorbis audio and Theora video streams.