Niek Albers, one of the major designers/programmers of CoolPlayer, is working on a new minimalist video player (as originally announced with CoolPlayer 206, a couple of days ago). A beta of this player is now online.

From the site:


As stated in the notes, this player requires DirectX 9....

- M.

it works well, nice to see something actually using the DX9 video renderers, which are really what the Radeon 9500/9700 and Geforce FX are designed for, video playback wise. Once you have video rendering to a 3d surface as you have here in DX9, you can start doing all sorts of things to it with pixel shaders, all in hardware, and of course, anything else you would normally do with a texture mapped polygon.
The other good thing is that DX9 exposes a load of new video accelleration interfaces for cards, such as standardised interface for hardware IDCT, colour space conversion, amongst others, and finally, playback in more than window at full speed. The traditional video overlay is gone, all strecting is done on the texture, so you can have as many as you want (or rather, as many streams as you can blast over AGP)

This player will accompany foobar on my machine... two minimalistic, high quality players!

sounds cool... but what actually useful things can you do with pixel shaders to a video stream? ati is saying that they post-process with a shader of some sort, but there has been no word that the post-proc is any higher quality than whats done through software. I guess it would help speed, but I just can't think how it will significantly help quality.

hello,

good player. I need some days more to have my own solution with DX9 ...

I have a Radeon 9700 and the CPU usage (kernel time) is higher than the CPU usage from Media
Player Classic ??? Have any other the same problem ?

elli

The situation with the 9700 and pixel shaded post processing is that currnetly it works in nothing other than a special RealPlayer edition, and even then, only when streaming, and only when playing RM files.
It has been the cause of much upset and discussion on the ATI boards.
As for DX9 and media playback with shaders, whatever application, it gives you the *capability and interface* to do it, but someone needs to implement their algortihms. Quality wise, it depends on what algorithm they use. Realvideo is so low bandwidth anyway, i dont notice any difference. However, it has the possibilty to be much better, now developers have an easier way to do it, and allows for all sorts of video effects other than post processing to be applied to, most of which are related to mixing two video sources into each other, or noise removal. The useful and impressive stuff will start appearing in the future, and it will be future looking applications like this, which support DX9 and DX9 only now, that will be the first to feature it.

Media Player Classic pretty much comes with the same key features:

http://vobsub.edensrising.com/mpc.php

If it is a minimalistic player, wht don't compress it with upx to make the file even smaller ?? (or zip the exe)

Because compressing the exe does nothing to make the app smaller, it just makes a file smaller on the hard drive. Once executed it has to be decompressed in memory, which would make it take more memory and CPU. Which doesn't sound minimalist.

UPX compression doesn't increase memory usage at all, and decompression is so fast that I doubt if any slowdown can be measured even with 386 processor. If this file was UPXed, it would have taken only 77KB instead of 164KB it takes now. I find this much more minimalistic.

Hi ,
I am CryptonX ( miss spelled in the forum )
I am the current webmaster and webdesigner of 1337player.com ( the official website for 1337player.com )

I'd just like to add that , the current version of 1337player is v0.9 and it's the first public version , so comparing it to a full featured and working application that's supported by one of the largest software companies is excuse me SILLY .

Windows Media Player Classis uses 40% more memory and page file ( WindowsXP task manager ) than 1337Player while playing the same 50 minutes long DivX movie .

1337Player Launches 10 times faster than WMP ( not precise , just try it )

as for UPX compression I've already tried that .. it gave me almost the same size as the .exe file in a .zip format , so I see no real OPTION in UPXing the exe .

And I would like everyone to visit the site and report bugs or errors or even wishlists on the forum , thanks alot for your feedback

i tried the two players (l33t player and media player classic) and they're both great players...and they indeed look minimalistic..but i found that they use more mem than wmp 6.4 or wmp9...

If you have a resident virus scanner running, opening packed .exe's will lead to noticeable slowdowns, even on a reasonably fast PC.

IMO, this is the main problem with packed executables.