A slight redesign for AMPE 1.0

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.