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Info_Mac IV CD-ROM (Pacific HiTech Inc.)(August 1994).iso
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New in 2.02
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1994-04-11
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What's new in 2.02?
• Compiled with gBreakFailure switched off. Damn. Damn. Damn.
What's new in 2.01?
• Implemented padding YUV macroblocks with a repeat of the last value of
each YUV triplet when macroblocks at the edge of a frame spill over
the edge. The most common case of this is a 120 pixel high movie with a
macroblock height of 128. In the past this spillover was filled randomly.
The result of this is that MPEGs created are about 15% smaller.
• Some diddling with the code used by the IDCT algorithm gives a speed boost
of about 5% to both playing and encoding MPEGs.
• Fixed a serious bug that prevented you from playing an MPEG if you started
playing it then interrupted it. A nice byproduct of this is that I got
jogging of MPEGs fully operational. You can now repeatedly view a section
of the MPEG by hitting command-right-arrow then command-left-arrow to keep
the MPEG moving forwards then backwards.
• Altered the alert popped up when the Thread Manager is not present to make
it more palatable to corporate and institutional users.
• Fixed the MPEG buffering which would give problematic results for very small
MPEGs (say three frames or less).
• Finally went through all resources, marking them purgable or not and removing
the unnecessary ones.
• Fixed the "PBBIBB" default frame set to make it correspond to the user view
of things, not my programmer's view.
• Fixed a bug that prevented a temporary movie created by the movie controller
handling an MPEG file from being destroyed.
• Fixed two bugs in the Think Class Library dealing with the loading of dialogs
then manipulating them without setting their memory blocks to non-purgable.
• Fixed a long-standing bug in the MPEG player buffer-handling code that
would cause the MPEG frame index to be incorrect if it was created while
memory was short. This probably never caused problems except for very long
MPEGs.
• When converting a QT movie into a different movie form, the dialog that comes
up asking you for compression options will have the frame rate and key
frame rate set at what the original movie used, sparing you from having to
guess. I will eventually have this working across all file conversions,
not just movie-->movie.
• The Think C 6 compiler contains a bug when performing code-motion optimization
on complex loops. If you run through the assembly it produces in this case,
it performs some very nifty register coloring and creating induction
variables for the loop. It then leaves out one crucial instruction to
update one of the induction variables each pass through the loop and so
the code is garbage.
As far as I can tell, this only affects one function in my code and I have
used a #pragma there to prevent it happening, but the fact that bugs like
this exist in the compiler is a little worrying.
• Revised all memory allocation so that it is more likely to not to use up all
memory reserves and leave nothing for toolbox.
• Found an especially nasty bug involving grabbing frames from a QT movie
which, when memory ran low, would leave the system GrafPort/GDevice
environment in an inconsistent state.
• Revised all uses of GWorld to use tempMem, but fallback to local heap if
tempMem is unavailable.
• Altered the strings used to popup error messages at startup if QuickTime
is not available. These got mixed up when I moved code around.
• The code to build the MPEG index when an MPEG is opened would run out of space
when a very large MPEG was opened---one of a thousand frames or more. Now
memory is allocated for this a little more flexibly.
• Fixed a bug I inserted when I changed from Sparkle 1.6 to 1.7. I rewrote the
Berkeley motion vector code to speed it up and in the process made one
little typo, shifting a variable right by 1 not 2. The effect of this, in
Sparkles 1.7 and 2.0 was that, under very rare occasions, blocks of color
would appear a few pixels off from where they should be. The only place I
ever saw this was three or four frames of the MPEG sales110.mpg.
This is not related to a separate problem.
The motion estimation code in the MPEG encoder (at present the Berkeley code
with practially no changes) is not perfect. It sometimes creates
blocks that appear to be wildly off from where they should be (by quite a few
pixels). This is not very obvious in real life, but is very obvious in animation.
This is largely a quantization artifact---it goes away if you lower the
quantizations. But obviosly you don't want to do that always, just where
necessary, so you really want a smarter quantizer that is adaptive.
I'll work on issues like this as soon as I can.
• When converting a movie with sound to MPEG or QT, occasionally pops of sound could
be heard. This is fixed.
• When converting movies with very low keyframe rates (say 20 or more dependent
frames per keyframe) occasionally the display of the movie would get confused
and appear to alternate between two different frames. This is fixed.
• The TCL does a very naughty thing in dealing with memory shortages by calling
Failure() which means traps that fail memory requests are left in an
inconsistent state. I changed this behavior to something more friendly.
What's new in 2.0?
• The structure of the code has been completely altered to be based on
threads. This makes it much easier for me to add new features to the code
while having it retain MultiFinder friendliness.
• Now opens and plays QT movies.
• Now can create MPEG files. General conversion from
{QT or MPEG}--->{QT or MPEG} is possible.
• Many minor changes to the way files are opened, named and such.
• Makes minor use of the speech manager if installed.
• You can now play MPEGs backwards.
What's new in 1.71?
• The progress bar now updates itself properly at the very end of saving
each frame to Quicktime. It also draws itself better on b/w screens.
• More of the default QT movie player keystrokes now work.
• The app notes if an MPEG file has many errors and if so warns you that
it has probably been transferred to the mac incorrectly.
• I have incorporated a workaround to make Sparkle work with the QT VM
extension. However I do not recommend you use the two together. If you do
use QT VM you will find Sparkle's memory usage a little less efficient
than without using QT VM. This is because of the way QT VM works.
• Fixed a bug that caused unusually sized MPEGs to display as distorted.
• Sparkle should now cope a little better with low memory situations.
• Added a small tweak to improve drawing on 16bit screens under low
memory conditions.
• Uses the most recently released version on the floating windoid.
• I have learned of an app that will convert QT to MPEG on the mac. It's
not the easiest thing to use and I recommend this only for people
who really need this, not for people who just want to play around.
See the README file for details.
What's new in 1.7?
• Opening files is much faster.
• Fixed the size of the checkboxes in the Open File dialog to the correct
size for all those millions of people who use Chicago as their system
font cause they have no sense of aesthetics. Oops.
• Now when Sparkle changes the file-type of an file, the Finder will update
the icon immediately, instead of forcing you to open and close the
folder to see a new icon. Thanks to Jamie McCarthy for telling me how
to do this.
• Added an "About Sparkle" dialog box to quieten the constant stream of
complaints about this.
• Changed the way progress is reported. I think the new scheme feels
rather more elegant. (If you have a fast machine and only use small
MPEGs, you may not notice this change much.)
• Adde random access. You can now use the step backward stepper, or
simply click in movie controller where you want to go. All standard
movie controller clicks and keystrokes are supported.
• Restructured the internal code vastly. This is what took most of the
time and while it doesn't directly help you users, it gives me
a framework that's much easier to build on. For example it should be
trivial to add Apple Event support when I get round to that.
• Three or four minor bugs were squelched, mostly involving Sparkle crashing
when it encountered MPEGs with invalid data in them.
• Now quits gracefully when started on a 68000 mac like a Classic, rather
than crashing. I'm sure lots of people care about this.
• Added better multi-tasking support. This takes two forms.
One is that the length of the timeslices Sparkle uses before giving up
the CPU are now absolute times. Before they were numbers that worked
well for my SE/30, but probably not optimally for slower or faster
machines.
The second is that you can now context switch out of Sparkle while it
is doing slow QT conversions (especially converting to Compact Video).
The way I have implemented this is not wonderful, but the best I can
do given the present way the code is structured. The next version
will use the Thread Manager and will do this rather better.
This second form of timeslicing is done through the
SetSequenceProgressProc() call which is new in QT1.6 and which is why
I now require use of QT1.6. Also QT does not yield the CPU very often,
and (as far as I know) there is no way to make it yield more often.
So while your machine is no longer completely frozen as it does its
conversion, it's still not too pleasant to use for typing. I can't do
much about this---complain to Apple and tell them to change this part of
QT, or better yet the whole OS.
What's new in 1.6?
• I became tired of continually having to explain to people about mac
file types, so I wrote a file filter function for the Open File dialog
box which displays ALL files with a .mpg suffix. This should make use a
lot easier for novices.
• Fixed a bug that involved writing to NULL.
• Fixed a bug that prevented IBP type MPEGs from rewinding when they
reached the end and the play button was hit twice.
What's new in 1.5.2?
• I was disposing of a handle twice (specifically I was disposing of a
pixmap and then its colortable, not realizing that DisposPixMap took
care of the colortable for me.) Thanks to Dan Sears for pointing this out.
I never noticed a problem due to this bug, but it's probably good to
have killed it.
Whats new in 1.5.1?
• One part of my speed optimizing code was not being initialized properly.
This caused a very specific type of MPEG file to show parts of its first
frame as greenish blobs. Now fixed.
• The code to detect errors in a corrupted MPEG file has been made even
more robust. Substantially better recovery from such errors, by
rebuilding the lost parts of a frame from the previous frame, has been
introduced. Thanks to a wonderfully corrupt MPEG file I pulled off
usenet with about 15 misc errors in it for pointing out new and
ingenious ways to fail.
• New icons, courtesy of Richard Lim in Britain. I hope you like them.
You will have to rebuild the desktop to see them.