mediate ice - new free DirectX based front end

**SWoodcock** · 04-02-2007, 05:42 PM

Has anyone else attempted to play a video/DVD in mediate ICE, had it fail, then attempt to play music and get a error: "Floating point Division by zero"? Other than that, this is a cool front end.

**jcee** · 04-06-2007, 01:09 PM

Ok, I am using a car-pc since 3 years, I have ckecked out several applications out there and have also build some own apps. So here my comments.

1. I wonder whether it is based on DX9 or DX9c?! DX9c needs a high performance gfx card to run smoothly. For a car-pc where power and heat might be an issue it is important to find the right balance between the gfx rendering capabilities and the hardware requirement.
(I myself run a Mini-ITX PC with a Via processor with 1GB)

2. The MP3 player needs (IMHO) following additional features.

- As databases with albums, genres, artists seems further down the road, it would be great to have at least playlist support. It would be easy to automatically generate playlist externaly when syncing.

- When handling long list of songs, it would be handy to have "speed dial" buttons on the screen to jump to each letter of the alphabet. E.g having buttons [A..C] [D..F] [G..I], etc. When hitting [D...F] the list immediatly jumps to the letters D to F.

- Build and keep a database which contains the position to what MP3 has been listend to. You could just store the MP3 name and the position in an XML. When one restarts that particular MP3 the player resumes at that given position. That feature becomes incredibly useful, when listening to audio-books. (like I do in my car). With other software you easily get lost, where you stopped the last time.
And this feature is better than manual set bookmarks.

- IPOD support!!!! I would love to see this in an application. I currently use Roadrunner that has partly IPOD support. It parses the itunedb and presents virtual folders for album/artist/genre.
Think: IPOD is one of the most favoured player. (I do not want to kick off a discussion now about the best player). And if you look at commercial car stereos and home cinema amplifiers, they have IPOD support.
First step would be to parse the itunesdb and offer some virtual subfolders like RR does.
Second, would be also parse and show the playlists.
Third, would be mirror the IPOD contents to the local harddrive. (I do this with a costum set of tools. So I keep all my music collection on my IPOD. I set up playlist and I listen in the car. From time to time I dump the IPOD to the cars HD, so even when I am without my Ipod this allows to listen to my music on th road).
Maybe you could join this with a general USB-stick support feature.
(In addition it would be awesome to update listen count and rating on Ipod DB)

- Visual: make the MP3 list controls scrollable and "bouncing" like one can see on the Iphone presentation. Have a look: Steve Jobs scrolls through the list by putting is finger on the screen and pulling fast down. He releases ghis finger from the screen, but the list continues to scroll and slows down.
As you are using DX9 that should not be to hard to implement and that would be cool eyecandy. (Currently you just allow line by line)

3. Navigation:
I use Mapmonkey, which is actally Destinator 3 based. I would love to upgrade to anything else. I live in Germany and I guess there are lots of packages available.
Would I am missing from my current GPS is some eyecandy features like smooth rotation, changeable tilt and perspective, zooming etc.
Lately I hab a look at these handy stand-alone pocket GPS and these already had neat scrolling, zooming capabilites. That should be avail via a PC and DX9 also.

I would pay up to 100$ and more for a front end like that.

And what is extremly interesting for me: SKINS and the ability to costumize. That is the reason to (still) staying with RR.

Hope there is some value in my comments for you guys.

I was already concidering developing my own spin off of RR. When I saw your app and if I would have a chance I would continue from there ;-)

regards

**taKuto** · 04-08-2007, 11:50 PM

after using the program i will most likely use it for my car. Just one real problem I have with the program is that it seems to be unable to read unicode formatted files, so the majority of my music cannot be opened (it says 'no media selected') and also doesn't display properly, so all the titles is question marks. Hope you can fix this in a future revision.

**nobb** · 04-09-2007, 12:26 AM

Yea the reason I am not using any frontend is because they dont support unicode very well. So far, I still prefer the standard XP interface with a properly skinned winamp. I have tried all the popular ones, including this one, and my chinese song titles dont display properly. Although the playlist support is pretty poor for this program, I really like how the interface is a bit animated, like windows MCE.

**Coach_Ng** · 04-10-2007, 06:20 PM

Is Mediate compatible with Ubuntu or is it only for windows?

**netis** · 04-11-2007, 01:27 PM

I love this frontend!! I'm waiting for news....

**athomemedia** · 04-12-2007, 04:44 AM

Thanks to everyone that has posted suggestions for Sat-Nav options. We've settled on using iGuidance for NA/Canada and PC Navigator for UK/Europe. iGuidance in the UK seems unsupported since version 2.1 and the old favourite Destinator only has an SDK available for really large orders (and a minimum $200,000 investment!).

So far we've implemented a prototype navigation screen using PC Navigator 6 - this is working really nicely with some cool alpha shaded effects and overlaid on screen display. We still have a few niggles to iron out with that so hopefully should be released some time next week. Once Navigator 7 is available we'll then extend the plugin to make use of the new SDK. Similarly, once Navigator is working nicely we'll integrate iGuidance - this should be a lot less work once we already have one navigation option working.

Meanwhile, the issue reported here with "Floating point division by zero" has been fixed, we hope to release a minor update with that and a few other things very soon.

To answer a few questions posed in recent posts:

1. mediate ice uses DirectX 9.0, with DirectX 9.0c extension libraries - these are only used for non-critical utility functions so rendering speed is not affected. The key reasoning behind the use of DirectX is to achieve high speed rendering on low spec hardware by offsetting load to the GPU.

2. We'll consider the suggested MP3 payer enhancements for a future release.

3. Navigation - we're not planning to officially support Destinator 3 or its derivatives such as Mapmonkey and Free Drive, but these can be added as a custom plugin if required. We'll publish details of how to do that very soon - we're working on a simple configuration wizard approach to integrate external applications.

As for GPS eye candy, we can do certain things in our rendering engine such as tinting, rotating, scaling etc. but unless the SDK offers some special support this would be applied to the whole GPS user interface including any menus etc. Nevertheless, we've already prototyped real time reflection which looks really nice.

4. Skins / Customisation - Feel free to play with the theme xml files and images! We recognise that RR has a big library of skins that contribute to its popularity - however we're hoping that the extra animation possibilities and cool effects possible with a DirectX based engine will encourage skin development for mediate ice too.

We have a functional in house theme designer but this needs more work before we can release it. We're also working on documentation for our theme format - its really a question of having time to fit all this activity into our development schedule.

5. Unicode - This isn't something we'd ever tested but should be easy enough to fix. We'll look at that for a future release.

6. Ubuntu - or any other flavours of Linux are unsupported. mediate ice is currently windows only since it relies on DirectX and DirectShow. A Linux app also brings into play all sorts of unpleasant patent issues with MP3 decoding which we'd rather avoid.

Thanks for all your feature requests - keep them coming as once we have navigation sorted we can get to those next.

Right, back to developing... :-)

**athomemedia** · 04-16-2007, 07:34 PM

mediate ice beta 1.6.5 is now available for download - this can be found at the usual URL of http://athomemedia.co.uk/downloads/m...mediateICE.exe

This version has the following changes:

Adds new start menu item to jump directly to advanced configuration screen
Adds optional maximum frames per second (FPS) throttling support
Adds option to control grouping of folders in directory listings
Adds plugin properties screen and plugin configuration (where supported by plugin)
Fixes "floating point division by zero" errors reported here
Fixes default theme selection if preferences file is deleted

A further release with sat nav support (PC Guidance only in first instance) should be ready in a few more days - watch this space...

**netis** · 04-17-2007, 10:13 AM

Why use a playlist (like RR) for the music player?

I think it will be better to select music by folder... A lot of people classify their music by sort or by artist in different folder.

(sorry for my bad english, I'm belgian

)

**nobb** · 04-17-2007, 06:59 PM

Yea, playing by folder would definately be awesome. I dont think I know any player/front end which allows you to do this. Playing by folder would be simplier than to have to fumble with playlists everytime.