Llama's and Intuition's Techie Thread

Well as for FMOD doing its voodoo with Xine I haven't been able to reproduce what it was doing so I'll just chalk it up to "whatever" and move on. I had Xine going through FMOD with a ring buffer but it still had clicks between buffers that couldn't be completely eliminated, so I'm saying to heck with it for now and will just close the instance and let Xine open the device itself. I won't get spectrum data but I doubt anyone really cares about that while watching a movie anyway.

I wish I could help with your S4 problem but I've never worked with that chipset before. I do know that many chipsets will change the refresh rate for both outputs to 60Hz when composite/s-video out are enabled and there is squat you can do about it.

Oh hey btw have you given your frontend a name yet? I've seen talk around this section about your player but nobody has referred to it by name :)

Silverwolf 2 is plodding along as I find free time here and there so hopefully the ~3 month timeframe is still accurate. The thing that is really taking time right now is completely re-engineering the skinning and UI. Alot of the backend guts will just be code from 1.x ported to Qt4.

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Originally Posted by intuitionsys

Well as for FMOD doing its voodoo with Xine I haven't been able to reproduce what it was doing so I'll just chalk it up to "whatever" and move on. I had Xine going through FMOD with a ring buffer but it still had clicks between buffers that couldn't be completely eliminated, so I'm saying to heck with it for now and will just close the instance and let Xine open the device itself. I won't get spectrum data but I doubt anyone really cares about that while watching a movie anyway.

I wish I could help with your S4 problem but I've never worked with that chipset before. I do know that many chipsets will change the refresh rate for both outputs to 60Hz when composite/s-video out are enabled and there is squat you can do about it.

Oh hey btw have you given your frontend a name yet? I've seen talk around this section about your player but nobody has referred to it by name :)

Silverwolf 2 is plodding along as I find free time here and there so hopefully the ~3 month timeframe is still accurate. The thing that is really taking time right now is completely re-engineering the skinning and UI. Alot of the backend guts will just be code from 1.x ported to Qt4.

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The player, for lack of a better name, is called LlamaBox. In regards to the S4, I pointed out 60Hz because that is a good thing. If that switcher changes it to 60Hz then something is right. Anyways, a BIOS flash fixed the problem.

As far as Qt goes.... It is the reason why I wrote my own toolkit. Speaking of that: I just spent today writing a really nice line drawing algorithm. It is based off bresenham's algorithm, but it draws lines with various weight and cap styles. This is needed on my VFD panel where there is no API for drawing primitives. (I've been limited to 1-pixel wide lines on this device until now).

But, The toolkit is coming along nicely. I added selection to the listview widget and I'm in the process of adding a TreeView. I have one huge stumbling block ahead: adding the theming engine. I must decide where to draw the line between the widget level and theme level.

Have you enjoyed using Qt's Styles? Are you making your own QStyle or are you just making your own widgets? When you make your own widgets, do you use the primitives provided by QStyle or do you just do it all by hand? This is the kind of experience I need to decide where to draw this line.

This line must lie somewhere between: "The style draws every widget, the widgets do not draw themselves" to "There is no Style".

The first method has two obvious disadvantages: Custom widgets must be used with a Style that supports them. Derived widgets cause a problem and there isn't any code reusability. The second method doesn't even provide Styles.

So, the answer is some place in the middle, where the Style provides primitives like borders, glyphs, fills, etc.. The hard part is quantifying all of these elements and finding a reasonable granularity.

Oh yeah, and I need to write this kernel module for the HQCT Radio.

EDIT: If you post or read information on this thread that you believe is important or critical then please let me know so I can add it the the first post. Might as well do this right. So, let me know -- even if you just read something from this thread and it helped you out.

EDIT, PART II: If you think of a name better then LlamaBox (there is undoubtably one) the let me know. It doesn't have to relate to anything -- just sound cool. But please PM it to me, or I guess I could start a thread. Now I am just rambling.

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Originally Posted by TheLlama

The player, for lack of a better name, is called LlamaBox.

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Well... it doesn't actually drip off your tongue does it? :yum: I'm sure someone out there has a killer name...

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Originally Posted by TheLlama

In regards to the S4, I pointed out 60Hz because that is a good thing. If that switcher changes it to 60Hz then something is right. Anyways, a BIOS flash fixed the problem.

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Cool. Done and done...

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Originally Posted by TheLlama

Have you enjoyed using Qt's Styles? Are you making your own QStyle or are you just making your own widgets? When you make your own widgets, do you use the primitives provided by QStyle or do you just do it all by hand? This is the kind of experience I need to decide where to draw this line.

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So far I've been drawing my own widgets with Qt's painting mechanism; so far they're all based on QFrame. The big one (that I've almost finished) replaces the QListView in all the modules (QDialogs) with a more "car-ish" widget with controls and behaviour so different from QListView itself (or any other Qt widget) that I decided it would be best to do all the primitive drawing myself.
I haven't touched QStyles other than reading through them.

Since all the behaviour and functionality of the widgets I want to use, including how things are displayed, is getting such a massive overhaul, there wasn't much choice but to draw the widgets manually. Qt really speeds things up by providing the primitives and painting engine, as well as some cool transparency effects (that I haven't actually taken advantage of yet but the potential is there nonetheless). In <2.0 I did alot of custom painting and workarounds (see customlvi.cpp for an example if you're curious) to fake the car-ish widgets, but I figured I'm porting alot of code at work to Qt4 so maybe it's time to do the same for Silverwolf and save ALL the mods (including FMOD, no pun intended :) ) for the big major number jump. I've seen that so many users have so many varied tastes, that QStyles just won't fit the bill anyway, not for something so specific as in-car use. It wouldn't be a bad approach for a desktop player though. Of course that's just one man's opinion...

You should see the skin.conf file for 2.0. It's freaking mental... :nutz: I hope once it's ready there are some "skinners" (is that a word or just a principal?) out there who can take advantage of it better than I. Alot of times I go gradient crazy and it just ends up looking gay :)

No offence.. but I think the reason I havn't actually installed Silverwolf is the skin.. lol. Skinnable would make it much more appealing. :)

-Chris

The current version is skinnable but you'd have to make your own (to your own liking). But if you're going to go through all that trouble I'd wait for 2.0 anyway so I guess it's a moot point :)

The good news is that almost everything in 2.0 will be sizable and replaceable with your own pixmaps. It just takes too long to draw all the pixmaps and the coding (not that I'm an artist anyway by a longshot :) ) so the default skin for 2.0 will probably suck too until it a) becomes reasonably popular and b) said users publish their skins.

One quick blast from the past about FMOD; I've been using it in the car for over a week now (or has it been two? I can't remember...) and it has a nasty habit of losing the left channel, although once it was actually a loose connector on my carpc. The more annoying thing though is that on occasion it simply stops working altogether and I have to restart the frontend (thus reloading the library) to get it working again. I also need to up the buffer size as the default seems to cause the occasional skip. I'm still using festival and it seems to work well alongside FMOD (I can hear both - such as "New wireless access point detected" and some song will play simultaneously), but that may be part of my problem. I just haven't had much time to investigate.

Cool - I'm glad you are making progress. Perhaps the FMOD error is in FMOD or it is in your code. I finally got USB communication working with the HQCT module so I just need to complete the radio API then I can add theme support to the GUI.

After adding the theme support to the GUI, I will finally be able to make a full-featured mp3 player. Once this happens we can compare our results with FMOD. I think you might be on to something if you think festival could be related to the problem.

I found the problem on the way home last night - nothing to do with FMOD. My carpc has its audio running into the aux a/v jacks of the OEM DVD player and for whatever reason the connection wasn't solid, probably slight oxidation. A quick twist back and forth on the RCA connectors to rub off whatever was causing the bad connection appears to have fixed the (non) problem and it hasn't happenned since.

Development of v2 has stalled the last week or so as I've been busy with other things but I hope to get back at it soon...

I could implement the speech synthesis I was going to use in v2 in the current version so tout le monde is using FMOD and see if the problem disappears.

Have you done any OBD-II software work at all? Any favorite OBD-II to Ser/USB/Whatever interface? The port on my van is unbelievably easy to get at and is begging to be tinkered with...

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Originally Posted by intuitionsys

Have you done any OBD-II software work at all? Any favorite OBD-II to Ser/USB/Whatever interface? The port on my van is unbelievably easy to get at and is begging to be tinkered with...

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I haven't done any OBD-II at all. I do have a serial interface that works with my car (I reserved pins on my LlamaBox's dock connector for this purpose.

One of these days..