READ ALL ABOUT IT! Rifftrax Player to be Open Source!

[RichSmith]

Awesome idea, guys. I have three operating systems in use, and Vista wasn't liking the RiffTrax Player, so that is out.  I'd love to watch them on my mac or on my boot of Ubuntu.

Thanks for offering this.

[FBX]

I'm not seeing any sort of "plugin" feature (like in winAmp), are you planning on forking this project and just turning in into a specialized player or is there something I am missing...?

[ja30278]

I'm not seeing any sort of "plugin" feature (like in winAmp), are you planning on forking this project and just turning in into a specialized player or is there something I am missing...?

There are a couple of ways that they could presumably go about this, depending on the language and how much customization is required.

 VLC builds almost everything in terms of 'modules', including the GUI. ( http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Modules ). Presumably, a 'lightweight' player could be made by creating a custom GUI module that used the existing 'Bridge' support for to handle the mixing. If they go this route, it's possible that a 'riff' gui could be included by default in VLC, which would have a lot of advantages.

Otherwise, (this is much more likely) it's a matter of wrapping a gui around VLC's language specific bindings. Using this approach, the player could potentially re-use some of the art assets from the current player (and possibly some of the gui code?), and just use VLC to do the heavy lifting of decoding.

[downinfront]

here's a question i have:

i do the same thing with my dvds that i do with my cds -- i rip them to a hard drive using handbrake and then put my dvds in a binder stored in back of a closet some where...

the problem i had with the rifftrax player [other than it not working on my macs] is that you needed to have the disc to make it work.

will using VLC eliminate this problem, so i could sync a rifftrax mp3 with an mp4 or avi? or would i still have to break out my binders and find the disc?

[i know that in the scope of problems in this world, this is but a small one -- but nonetheless it would make my life easier if i could just use my movie drive...]

ta.

[torgosPizza]

This is something we were just discussing. I think a goal would be to allow syncing with a consistent codec, such as Divx or Apple's mpeg-4 format (which would allow you to buy something from iTunes, for example, and be able to sync the track up with it). This would surely mean more availability for titles, which seems like an easy justification for such an advantageous feature.

[ja30278]

This is something we were just discussing. I think a goal would be to allow syncing with a consistent codec, such as Divx or Apple's mpeg-4 format (which would allow you to buy something from iTunes, for example, and be able to sync the track up with it). This would surely mean more availability for titles, which seems like an easy justification for such an advantageous feature.

It would be nice if the player itself could report back file hashes and user-set offsets (or whatever sync scheme you use) to a central server (anonymously of course) in order to automatically build a database of sync points for various files. Obviously you guys would 'prime the pump' with sync data for official releases (against the DVD and possibly itunes file), but for other files, once one person went to the trouble of setting up the sync points, everyone else using that particular file gets the sync data automatically.

Harmony does this with their remotes, and I think it's a particularly brilliant feature.

[torgosPizza]

That is a cool feature, and while I don't think that's something we'll have from the get-go, it's an example of where the open source model could come in handy. Another user who is a developer could code that feature for us, and give us a patch that would incorporate that functionality for inclusion with a future build.

Speaking of which, it looks like the potential best way to go about this is to fork our own branch of VLC. Essentially we'd keep source code untouched, but create our own 'module' or 3rd-party library that would include all of our Riff functionality. This would get compiled locally by us into Linux, Windows and Mac builds and pushed out to the site someplace. That way when VLC updates their source, we can update our local branches accordingly and push out a new version.

I don't think it's the BEST solution, but it appears that plugins don't appear in VLC the way I thought they would. This does appear to be the next-best thing, though.

[k1]

This is something we were just discussing. I think a goal would be to allow syncing with a consistent codec, such as Divx or Apple's mpeg-4 format (which would allow you to buy something from iTunes, for example, and be able to sync the track up with it). This would surely mean more availability for titles, which seems like an easy justification for such an advantageous feature.

It would be nice if the player itself could report back file hashes and user-set offsets (or whatever sync scheme you use) to a central server (anonymously of course) in order to automatically build a database of sync points for various files. Obviously you guys would 'prime the pump' with sync data for official releases (against the DVD and possibly itunes file), but for other files, once one person went to the trouble of setting up the sync points, everyone else using that particular file gets the sync data automatically.

I know I'd be more inclined to purchase feature film iRiffs if that were the case.  (Or create them.)

[torgosPizza]

Part of the goal of the last player was to let iRiffers make their own .riff files too. So the way that this is going to go, I'm sure that it'd be doable. And it'd probably be way easier, too, since everything about the files will be standardized (including the frame or other timing info from the DVD). It's definitely something worth looking into.

[Shinigami]

Well, I don't have VLC or video coding experience in particular, but I got a degree in Computer Engineering. I would be interested in contributing.

[torgosPizza]

Well it's written in C++ so if you have experience in that, you might be alright. PM xrampage16 if you've got the skills.

[Shinigami]

Well it's written in C++ so if you have experience in that, you might be alright. PM xrampage16 if you've got the skills.

As a matter of fact I do and already got a hold of him. Unfortunately, VLC 1.0.0 just dropped and due to traffic constraints I can't access the site's docs and do research. Annoying as hell.

[torgosPizza]

Yeah they took the Docs down yesterday, there were 404s all over the place. I was able to git the latest code and compile it on my Mac, so once I've done some digging to figure out exactly how we can approach this, I'll try to get my hands dirty and help out. I'm the junior C++ guy (I'm actually starting to learn it just so I can help on this project - it seems similar enough to PHP, so the learning curve shouldn't be too bad) - so if you have any pointers feel free to share them.

I think I'll create a "Player development" board so that we can all share thoughts and information about this as we move forward.

[FlOcK oF rAbId ShEeP]

from my short stint in c++ i realized how important it was to have a font that made it easier to tell the difference between "I" upper case "i" and "l" lower case "L"...

[FBX]

I think biggest hurdle will be getting the thing to compile. Seems like every open source software project seems to forget that not everybody has every single library known to man already (properly) installed on their machine. The readme that ships with it seems a tad out of date with the installation instructions as well. Will be waiting for wiki.videolan.org to come back up...