Future Plans, Upcoming Events

[TSG]

My life... has been really weird this year. It seems so busy, but from the outside it seems so empty. So progress on our applications has been very, very, intermittent.

The homepage, will stay how it is for now, anymore work will further delay work on our applications and thats what you guys really want. The next version of RAWR-Player and ToG are both complete. I am not adding anything drastic, I have stated before, I am basically going for stability. However there is some interesting work going on here with VLC Player that I am listening to.

VLC has been my main video player for years, up until Windows 7 Beta, it seems to conflict with Directx. But it still works, it is just pixelly. It will get fixed I guess. If it works with the main browsers on the Windows operating system we will definetly add it. I have already got Richard implementing it into the new preview box which has been in the works since late last year.

We will implement our own interface for VLC online player, so it fits in with the templates nicely, we will try to optimise the javascript overhead for that too. We want something like lightbox, but with less javascript overhead, and something we can call our own. The plan at the moment is to get images, and rawr-player/vlc on a switch option for the user to decide which they want to use. With everything on a playlist in the bigger templates. So its a smooth transition between each object in the list.

RAWR-Player is as good as its going to get without a re-write in ActionScript2, the next version, I'm talking mid 2010 I think, will be done in the newest version of ActionScript. There was talk of browsers supporting media by default without flash in HTML5, but this seems to have been scrapped recently, so we will continue doing what we are doing.

Expect ToG and RAWR-Player to get released in the next few days, with RAWR-Template following, I haven't started to work on that yet.

[slasherx]

VLC support would be great, as mysoogal has been implementing it default template. I have tested and the quality and speed is awesome comparing to divx player.

I can't wait, thanks for updating us and  putting your valuable time towards this

Thank you

[TSG]

I forgot to add that the next releases wont have VLC but the older configuration of players that I have, simply because I want to spend some time on the VLC option with the new preview box.

[slasherx]

I forgot to add that the next releases wont have VLC but the older configuration of players that I have, simply because I want to spend some time on the VLC option with the new preview box.

aw, no problem possibilities of beta versions?

[mysoogal]

TSG, its not vlc issue you got i believe your graphic driver need updating, i too had problems with vlc and mplayer having pixel blocky video on vista home basic :O.

i fixed it by updating video driver. or maybe you need to use overlay in vlc  .


will your template have thumb support as shown in this picture ? with file title ? i have been trying to make something like this for hfs theme many hours i can't think anymore  , it would be pretty nice to have thumbs support in your template 

Example:
http://www.rejetto.com/forum/index.php?topic=7166.0

[TSG]

Probably not, I haven't got the time to work on such things.

I think something like that, a gallery template, calls for a new template. The more we pack into a single template the harder it is to keep up to date. We learn't this with Terayon and RAWR-Template.

We have been talking about making a youtube/media style template for a long time, but time is the killer here.
Posted on: July 08, 2009, 04:53:27 PMOk, RAWR-Player, Terayon, RAWR-Template and Thunderchicken of Glory have been updated.

If there is any major bugs, of course I will fix them, but this should get us through to the new preview box with vlc integration.

Sorry for the huge gaps but I have to balance these things.

[AvvA]

Sorry if this post is misplaced, it concerns every single template

How will you manage the new HTML 5 elements such as <video> ?
Won't that replace any existing web player out there ?

[TSG]

It was scrapped in the latest publication due to a lack of support from the clients. Firefox was all for it, but IE was not, and they couldn't decide on standard formats. But yes if this happens, of course I like stuff that works for everyone. We would however have to re-write the templates... I don't look forward to it. I would prefer to just make a new template that would be HTML5 compliant.

[AvvA]

Thanks for the quick answer  

That's a nice way to handle it, I'll keep an eye on your templates and hope that they'll open more video formats to this tag

[Sapphirescales]

How about in the next version you add those cool icons from TOG?  I already did it on my customized template but I gotta say those icons for RAWR have got to go.  They're small, blurry, and have white crap all over them.  I forget how I added the icons from TOG to RAWR, but I remember it wasn't that hard:

Image

EDIT:  Oh yeah, and I spent about an hour editing all of the icons for TOG because they too had white crap all over them.  They're still MUCH better than the RAWR icons though.

[TSG]

To do it properly I would need to use PNG24, or spend a lot of time making icons that work with various themes in RAWR-Template. But that is why we provide the basics, and let people use their imagination.

I was hoping HFS itself would support nicer windows icons by default but its something rejetto still has not got around to.

[Sapphirescales]

Yeah, I used PNG24.  It's not that hard.  I needed Photoshop CS3 to make them look decent but after you've made them in Photoshop CS3 (that exports in PNG32), it won't look decent in IE6.  I don't know if you can specify exporting to PNG24 in CS3 but I just opened and re-saved every image in Photoshop CS2 to convert them to PNG24 while preserving their transparency. 

Then all you gotta do is increase the size of the icon box area and switch around the icons.  I think I just specified a new icon path and put the icons in a folder in the RAWR template folder.  It took 5 minutes to apply the icons.  Removing the white crap and converting them to PNG24 is what took some time and effort.

[AvvA]

Here is a small piece of software that perhaps would have saved your time
PNG Optimizer

Take the command-line version (at the bottom of the page) to be able to batch a folder, but take also the full PNG Optimizer (at the top of the page), just to have the full documentation.

 You 'll discover that you can keep or not the background color, the interlacing and avoid grey with simple transparency.

...
== Some notes about the optimization engine ==

When optimzing, PngOptimizer tries to decrease the number of bits per pixel.
It means that a 32 bits image may become a 24 bits image, a 24 bits image
may become a 8 bits indexed image, a 8 bits indexed image may become a
4 bits indexed image...

What PngOptimizer specifically avoids is increasing the number of bits per
pixels when transparency is involved. For example, an indexed image will not
be converted to a 32 bits image even if it can lead to a better compression.

The reason is that when you have a bunch a transparent indexed PNG files, you
usually want to keep them indexed so they can still be displayed correctly in
Internet Explorer 6.
...

Well, I hope this could help

[TSG]

Each template is a sign of its time, ToG and Terayon are over 2 years old, just updated with the latest tech. RAWR-Template introduced macro, and because I wrote RAWR-Template from the ToG source I was able to link in the RAWR-Template language files. The upcoming Live is simply a lightened up and simplified version of Live 2. RAWR-X will be very different to all of our templates, but that is just planning ahead.

For now our immediate concern is the new preview box and proper upload functionality. I know everyone wants features. But the truth is we can't please everyone. We do try though.

I had a talk with Richard and we want to make a Flash or Java uploader... we don't really know where to start with it. It would replace the [upload] and [progress] section of all our templates. Because, lets be honest, the only time you want to know how a file is going in its transfer is when you upload the file. This will also remove the shitty upload form and the half assed transfers pages that we have in all the templates. For now I will have to release Live 3 with this old method for uploading but as time goes on, thats our plan, you can hassle us all you want but things take as long as they take.

Another topic was multi-selection archive downloading and delete for our older templates. The idea we have for our older templates, involves a method of highlighting rows or modules on the page, just like in windows with your ctrl and shift keys, then you can simply hit a delete or download button and it would happen, ctrl+a would select all. All nice and neat.

Also as soon as rejetto releases a working Beta with better icons I will release a new version of all the templates using them. Finally we might possibly have pretty icons without any hassle! Especially if you are using Vista or 7.