Henri Morlaye napsal(a): >Hello, >Are there any plan to improve the multimedia capabilities of Rebol ? ( >audio and video ) ? >I think Videolan would be a good start, stripped down to an audio >codec and a video codec it should be quite light and very portable. >Plus as Rebol is a messaging language, Videolan is a messaging >audio-video software, there is eveything built-in for broadcast, >multicast... > >Henri > > The question is - what do we consider being "multimedia". OK, I will provide you with what was though/said in the past, but sadly never happened. Maybe you do not know, that originally, REBOL was called LAVA (Language for Audio and Video Applications). RT changed its name according to some suggestions, as LAVA was too close to JAVA (today LAVA is some other language ...) And sadly - it is good it changed its name, as REBOL is far from being media friendly.
Such discussions do appear here periodically. Carl once replied here, that his second name is multimedia and that he would too wish Rebol being more media friendly. Some folks here claim, that you can e.g. animate gfx object to move across screen. Rebol is said to use double-buffering internally, but - try that. I buy a beer to anyone, who shows me fast and SMOOTH moving gfx objects using Rebol. And if you think that your stuff is smooth, download and run Scala Multimedia to actually see, what do I mean by smoothness ;-) (some folks here in our company think that PowerPoint provides you with smooth animations :-) So - there was (and hopefully is) some willingness to change the situation. What things were talked about? Carl once mentioned, that he could provide us View plug-ins, so that ppl could write effect extension, faster blitting routines or something like that. More granular event system was mentioned too. But years passed by and nothing happened in that regard. View 1.3 still contains "old" non async core, not to mention things like multitasking, proper timers available even for Core (not View only using face/rate trick). But we have got something - at least we have AGG integrated for vectors, which is really cool library. Some recent version of AGG offers also compositing engine. Maybe it would be wise if RT would switch View compositing to AGG too - it would probably make sense. So - what's left for sound for e.g.? We found rather interesting library, called fmod. It is not completly free, but maybe worth integration. But - there are other things we could want to integrate into Rebol - e.g. BitStream font engine. The thing is - where is the boundary, where do we want Rebol to end? We need to keep cross-platform compatibility, we want to keep it small. My opinion was clear - Rebol should become kind of OS - tasking, general VM and proper componentisation. Core.exe, View.exe, Command.exe, Whatever.exe is not good for anyone imo. We would not probably tolerate View.exe becoming 300KB larger by adding e.g. good sound library, but if things would be properly componentised - main kernel would be kept small and I would easily tolerate modules for sound, or even specialised ones. Some folks tend to disagree and fear so called "dll hell" effect, that someone missing certain component/module would be unable to run it. I say - someone not having /Command module will not be able to use .e.g ODBC call, so what is the difference? The question is, if RT is ready for such radical change in aproach. Currently REBOL is cool language technology, but I would not call it probably call it a "system", unless it is componentised, modularised (in a well thought out manner of course :-) and extensible ... Cheers, -pekr- -- To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.
