CinoDVD project paused | Drobe.co.uk archives

CinoDVD project paused

Published: 19th Aug 2006, 23:40:50 | Permalink | Printable

Hardware needs to fast forward

The team behind CinoDVD, the proposed DVD player software for the Castle Iyonix, believe the project is no longer financially viable. Programmer Adrian Lees, pictured, said potential sales wouldn't be enough cover the cost of development, while publisher Neil Spellings feared cheap off-the-shelf DVD player kit will price them out of the market.

Neil said: "Given the price of standalone DVD players, around £20, I'd be surprised if people would actually pay the huge premium that a commercial DVD player for RISC OS would now require to cover development costs."

He added that a fully capable DVD player for RISC OS would be possible once "we get graphics hardware accelerated decoding, or a machine fast enough to do pure software decoding."

Aemulor Pro and Geminus author Adrian added that much of his time over the past three years has been spent on improving the Aemulor line of products.

He said: "I'd go so far as to say that Cino sales definitely would not cover development costs. Cino is still two to three times faster than KinoAMP, but only half, maybe a third, of the performance it needs to be a good product."

Adrian has already quit working on full-time commercial RISC OS software to find full-time employment elsewhere as only Aemulor and Aemulor Pro managed to become financially viable products. CinoDVD was first unveiled in late 2003, when it was hoped that updates to the underlying RISC OS internals could provide enough juice to support a full-framerate DVD player.

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Discussion

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Aemulor is a really wonderful program so I hope its development will continue. I'd be happy to buy any upgades!

markee174 on 20/8/06 2:51AM
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Wouldn't it be great if there were upgrades for Aemulor that included a alpha/beta copy of Cino. ie you can have an Aemulor upgrade for £?? or for £??+10 you can have a copy of Aemulor AND a Cino alpha/beta!!!

rmac on 20/8/06 3:21AM
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I'm often surprised when the schoolkids I teach show me that their latest mobile phone can be turned into a £5 sounding transistor radio and expect me to be impressed. There is a lot of muddled thinking about what a computer is for and, if it's a big effort, perhaps geting DVD's to play on an Iyonix is pointless. All the same, one thing often leads to another and I think it is a shame that this project has stalled.

martin on 20/8/06 12:29PM
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@martin: Of course they sound like a cheap transistor radio hwn you use the internal speaker, but when you use the headphones or plug them into a good stereo set, modern mobile phones actually sound quite good. I usually use the ogg vorbis format on my SonyEricsson P910. With a few 1GB MemoryStickProDuo I always have my favorite titles with me. It will even play videos in mp4 format.

JGZimmerle on 20/8/06 4:27PM
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martin: A computer is for everything that RISC OS can do.

A computer is not for everything that RISC OS can not do.

Was that what you're trying to say

flibble on 20/8/06 5:40PM
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Surely the development has built up a significant knowledge base? Please don't let that go to waste.

AW on 20/8/06 10:52PM
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Can anything come out of this such as the work done to improve the background transfer of ADFS? Was a DVD filing system ever looked in to?

druck on 21/8/06 9:13AM
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The work to provide non-blocking transfers in ADFS wasnt started until we were confident that would allow us to complete the project. As it happens, it wasnt the limiting factor and as ADFS is a critical OS component we didnt tinker for the sake of it or do a half-hearted job, especially as it would incurr heftly licensing fees.

It maybe the case that something could come out of the Cino project - its just a question of how much effort it would take to create "release quality" code (of DVDFS for example)

Cheers,

Neil

spellinn on 21/8/06 9:28AM
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Don't bother with DVDFS - we already have a DVD filing system (confusingly called CDROMFS) which would just need to bypass the bloody CDFS driver stuff for better device compatibility. Ian, do you hear me ;-)

hubersn on 21/8/06 10:34AM
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This is a shame, although I fully understand the reasons. I wonder if this is another nail in the coffin for RISC OS - my Iyonix has recently been away for the hardware modification and I've been doing my web design on the iMac. Having done web design on the iMac I'm not sure I want to go back to doing it on the Iyonix.

Just about the only Iyonix software I use these days is Artworks - keep up the good work Martin! I desperately want the market to survive, but we're losing ground on the opposition.

cables on 21/8/06 12:29PM
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OK, I was a bit hasty. I don't understand why I wasn't modded down!

Using the Iyonix in multi-screen mode makes web design so much easier it's worth putting up with the software not being quite so good as Appleworks word processor. I'll be carrying on doing my web design on RISC OS.

cables on 24/8/06 12:06PM
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cables> Probably because you wrote something people don't want to read. Fwiw, I agree that RO's limitations are painfully obvious after using another platform but I still have a number of reasons for preferring RO. Cino's status hasn't changed over the past couple of years. Really this article is just a 'status report' in response to the question raised on the newsgroups.

In fact, I wrote some test code recently which I think demonstrates that 25fps playback at DVD resolution is possible on the Iyonix, but it will take a lot of work to tune the software to that level. The IOP321's memory bus isn't really adequate for implementing motion compensation in software. That doesn't prevent more appropriate hardware being employed, but it does make it even more of a niche product.

There's a lot of code in Cino that could find use elsewhere - the DVD filing system works with CD-ROMs, audio CDs and DVD-ROMs, the AC3 decoder is faster than the fairly basic port currently employed by KinoAMP, the overlapped DMA to screen is already used by Geminus and likely soon by NetSurf/Tinct, the optimised MPEG decoder has multiple other uses (once fixed

as has already been noted. DeCSS and authentication with the DVD-ROM drive etc etc. What happens to it all is something I haven't yet decided.

Personally, I think the fact that I can no longer spend the bulk of my development time writing RO software is a sadder reflection of the platform than the fact that Cino hasn't materialised on the (somewhat performance-limited) hardware that we have available.

adrianl on 24/8/06 4:18PM
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In reply to Adrianl:

You appear to have misread me Adrian. I said I can't understand why I WASN'T modded down!

As Geminus multi-screen is my main reason for still doing web design on RO, you can take the credit.

cables on 25/8/06 12:49PM
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