How is OS4 ?

[Fab]

I don't know much software for OS4 which is labelled as alpha/beta, most of the software released there are stable versions, and not all of the software for OS4 has a MOS version.


Not a problem since MPlayer exists for OS4 too, and it's free as well. From my experience, DVPlayer handle DVDs better than MPlayer.

Erm, MPlayer has more complete and faster support for DVD than DVPlayer (and don't blame the DVPlayer author, it's really quite some work to support it fully, even when reusing ffmpeg), and it even supports DVD menus (experimental, though). Whether the OS4 MPlayer port supports all this correctly is another matter.

That will be probably fixed with a future Timberwolf release with support for HTML5 videos. BTW MOS currently lacks a Firefox port.

Timberwolf already has HTML5 video support, but only for Theora, not H264, which is used in Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and a couple others. However, google is pushing its VP8 codec. So, if FireFox 3.7 is ported to OS4, you'll get VP8 support, and only then, you'll have a chance to play youtube in timberwolf (except if you get flash first, but i seriously doubt it).

[Fab]

sorry Crumb but i don't agree!

In everyday use on my CSPPC, AOS4 is much responsive than Morphos 1.4.5 (with MUI4 and a recent Ambient). If you are speaking about the barebone 1.4.5 with MUI 3.9 the comparision is not fair, because most of the recent apps, requires MUI4 :-)

Stop using a mui/intuition skin that abuses alpha blending, then (the default one does).

[Fab]

how do you know what skin i'm using?

Its slower, period :-) more advanced/bloated but slower.

People tend to use default configuration and skins, and i repeat, that config was way too heavy for a classic configuration (antialiased truetype fonts, blending, ...). Maybe you also use serial debug, which wouldn't be a good idea, considering that MUI4 build was some debug version.

But with a suited skin/fonts, it can't be slower than OS4, no.

[Fab]

Does that mean that OWB has all the functions available on DownloadHelper integrated, i.e. supporting the download of video and audio from the same number of supported sites, and optional on the fly video-video or video-audio conversion?

That's basically what something like getvideo does. And getvideo can be integrated very easily to OWB in contextmenus.

I had a look at that downloadhelper extension for firefox, and I can't help but noticing the large proportion of supported adult sites ....

[Fab]

Actually I feel familiarity with AmigaOS4 something i felt a little with Icaros (I have it here) and very little with Mos (shown to me by a very kind and capable person mind you).

This kind of statement looks really amazing to me. I know you said "feel", but could you give any argument to explain that feeling?

(all the more amazing when it's actually OS4 that introduces all kind of non amiga-like and unsuited concepts)

[Fab]

LOL ... unbelievable! your posting a test with a BPPC @160 Mhz with 64 megs of ram on AGA ... what a delusion!, i thought you were a much more correct person/user! whatsup lately mos guys? the Timberwolf thing is hard to swallow? wasn't "pratically impossible to port"? are you all a bit "nervous"?

ah, btw .... since you are going so "low" ... mos OWB 1.8 port IS un-useable under Classic, much more advanced than the OS4 one (thats perfectly useable on classic btw) but NOT useable (3 pages and you are out of mem!)

Nobodys' perfect .... face it

I got very different reports from other mos pup and os4 users, by the way. And it doesn't use more memory than OS4 OWB at runtime, for your information (probably even less, in fact, since i fixed some leaks, but there are so many in webkit, anyway). But in the end, i'd rather say both are unusable on classic, because of speed and memory usage.

And regarding timberwolf, there's nothing to swallow, really. An half-assed port of something that should only have required one month to port has nothing really appealing. OWB (even for OS4) probably required much more work, since the GUI had to be written from scratch, in addition to the usual layers like memory/thread/file/events/network/graphics... In timberwolf case, the whole UI is based on the graphics layer, which means it's just much less work to port.

[Fab]

If that really were the case, how come nobody else has actually bothered in all the years the bounty was up?

It's not really a relevant question. The persons who tried either did it before the cairo switch, or were just incompetent.

It seems that the GUI is the most problematic part of the current alpha version. At present, I'm inclined to believe that WebKit might be easier to manage since it's no doubt a lot cleaner code wise than gecko is.

I've tried it. From what i can see, the most problematic part seems to reside in events propagation and subwindows in particular, which gives all kind of funny bugs in dropdown menus, lists and so on. But the pure graphic (draw) part shouldn't be a problem at all, at least when the cairo implementation works properly, which is probably not the case when using the new os4 hardware-accelerated surfaces (cf. glitches when scrolling, black areas, overlapping/bad clipping and so on).

And i had a look at FireFox 3.5 sources. It looked separated enough for a clean port, at least. Most layers implementations looked fairly straightforward (just as webkit). The only thing that scared me a bit was the network layer, because of bsdsocket limitations that could easily complicate the implementation.

[Fab]

I allways find irritating how MorpOS guys allways attack every OS4 thread, even when it is purely OS4 here in amiga.org

OS4 hobbyits doesn't do that for MorphOS threads, I think that is safe to say that OS4 guys have generally betters manners.

It is allso safe to say, that generally that OS4 users aren't intrested about MorphOS , when MorphS boys and girls seems to be quite intersted and I think that tells quite lot about MorphOS

If good manners of these OS4 users consist in answering that there's only OS4 as successor of the Amiga to the nostalgic people who come back to the scene, and happily forgetting any mention to AROS or MorphOS, then, yes, they have very good manners.

When a "newcomer" asks me the state of the amiga world today, i always give the 3 alternatives. Ignoring blindly the other solutions is just narrow-minded.

[Fab]

Oh and the reason why people prefer AmigaOS over MOS is the same I told Crumb, they all have a modern system, so they are not as desperate as you think for a feature or two, don't be surprised if they don't care for an unofficial project that runs on Apple scraps.

Just for the record, the x1000 is also based on Apple scrap CPU. How do you feel about that? I wouldn't care, but you certainly should.