Music and Video player

[Cammy]

You can play CDXL video on a 68000. It's uncompressed, so it depends more on the speed of your drive than anything else. If you're playing it from a CF card, you should be able to get decent sized HAM6 CDXL videos playing on your screen. You'll need to download some CDXL playing software from Aminet, and scour some CDTV/CD32 discs for some videos, or you can make your own by converting MPEG/AVI videos.

You can also use a program to convert your MP3s to WAV or IFF 8SVX, then you can play them in SongPlayer or one of the other music players, and it will sound as good as Paula can sound, but won't be CPU intensive to play.

The files all end up being larger and lower quality than the original compressed formats, but the fact that you CAN make a computer from 1985 play full-motion video (in 4,096 colours) and fully digitised songs is still pretty impressive.

[Cammy]

If you would like to download a CDXL clip to test out on your Amiga, I made this one a while ago as a test. In the CDXL software, you need to set it to double the height of the video, so then it will be in the right aspect. It's a widescreen film clip, and was designed to run from a 2X CDROM, but should have no problems streaming off of a CF card.

Here's a link to the file - http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/HAM6.CDXL
And here's a compressed archive of the file for quicker download - http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/HAM6.rar (you will require UnRAR or similar software).

[Cammy]

Oops, I accidentally renamed the 256 colour version HAM6, so it won't work on OCS/ECS Amigas. I'll upload the real HAM6 version in a minute. I'm sorry about that.

[Cammy]

Okay guys, sorry about the mixup earlier. I have two versions of this clip. You can use the utility CDGSXL from Aminet to play them. This player has the ability to double the height of the video using the Copper chip, which helps us have larger looking videos for slower CDROM drives. These two clips were designed to stream from a 2x CDROM, and I've tested them on a CD32 and they play back at the right speed without any skipping. The only problem I have encountered is this flickering of colour occasionally, which I've only observed in my own CDXL videos, so I must have done something wrong when I made them. I really want to look into making some nicer clips to play on CDTVs, CD32s, and from CF/HDD on A600s and A1200s. Next time I might attempt to convert a movie trailer, but for now I have a short clip from the movie "I Am Legend".

Here's the 256 colour version I previously uploaded, but renamed now - http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/IAmLegend256.CDXL
And here's the HAM6 version, which should play on an A600 - http://home.exetel.com.au/amiga/IAmLegendHAM6.CDXL

[Cammy]

I just played the video on my A600, and none of the players I downloaded from Aminet seemed to work. I think CDGSXL might need an 020 for it to work. AnimFX definitely needs an 020.

It works in MultiView but it plays it too slowly. I don't know if any players are going to work yet, sorry.

[Cammy]

Play16 will play streaming wav files, but it doesn't have its own GUI, although there may be some available for it. You basically run it, select the file to play with an ASL requestor, and it plays the file. You can use it from CLI too, or even have it play a song from early on in the Startup-Sequence, so as your Amiga boots up it's playing your favourite music too.

http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/Play16

I still really want to look into this CDXL situation. They SHOULD run on a plain A600, since they run on a 1MB CDTV! They play perfectly on my A1200 030 and my CD32.

Also, if you'd like a nice program for converting WAV to IFF and other formats, try Sound Box from Aminet, and remember to download the keyfile too.

http://aminet.net/package/mus/misc/SoundBox
http://aminet.net/mus/misc/SoundBoxKey

Good luck, let us know how you go!