ANNOUNCING KWinTV (Rewrite) Developer Alpha release 1 ============================================ The KWinTV developers are happy to announce the first release of the complete rewrite of KWinTV. This release, "Alpha 1", is not considered to be a stable release. It serves several purposes including: - Demonstration of the upcoming design - Provide a relatively usable package to help some users who have had difficulty with kwintv since upgrading to KDE 3.0 - Provide developers with a working base system so that they can help port to other platforms, write plugins, or work directly on the code, graphics and documentation - Determine the suitability of the current design and plugins What is KWinTV? KWinTV is a KDE 3 based application for viewing television on your desktop. It aims to provide a very modular interface and backend. It currently supports Xv video sources, and will provide a direct video4linux plugin in the next release. It also aims to be portable to various hardware and operating platforms. It is derived from the original KWinTV application by Moritz Wenk. How To Get The Code You can obtain the source code from: http://www.staikos.on.ca/~staikos/kwintv/alpha/ There will be no binaries provided by the developers. Please do not ask for any. You can join the kwintv mailing list at http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kwintv Known Problems With The Package - configure runs twice (must be missing files) - you may need autoconf 2.5 or better - do not expect it to build anywhere except Linux right now Release notes follow...... KWinTV Rewrite Alpha 1 ---------------------- June 27, 2002 Authors: George Staikos Rich Moore Kevin Hessels Stefan Hellwig Webmaster http://www.kwintv.org/ Thank you for taking the time to test this alpha release of the rewrite of KWinTV. It is currently named QtVision because it is based on a similar application named QtVision, and was left as such to avoid clashes with existing installs of KWinTV. To launch the new application, run "qtvision". This release is intended as a basic demonstration of the design of the application. It provides functionality in the form of support for Xv video streams, OSS mixer (/dev/video, mixer 0), and XML channel files. It most likely only works on Linux, and in fact may only work on ia32 hardware. Camera devices may or may not work. Working ------- - Xv input streams - XML channel files - Channel import and loading - Volume control via OSS mixer plugin - Autostart - Device selection - Some plugin support - Partial applet functionality - Partial kpart functionality - Channel navigation - Fullscreen mode - DCOP Known not working ----------------- - Other channel formats - Mute (partially broken) - Aspect ratio - Some resizing issues - Plugin configuration panel - Direct channel number changing - Mixer device selection - Norm functionality - Screensaver - LIRC - Panel Extension - Sidebar resizing - We need more/new icons - Snapshots - Recording - Channel wizard - Missing some accelerator keys - Mouse wheel support is somewhat inconsistent - Video desktop - Help - Lots of other stuff... it's an alpha! How to enable the Xv "v4l" module --------------------------------- Make sure you're using XFree86 4 or better. Edit your XF86Config file and find the Section "Module". Within this module, add an entry: Load "v4l" Restart your X server. Note that you must have the V4L module for your tuner card loaded before you start X if you want the v4l Module in the X server to find your card. How to help ----------- We can really use some help in developing this code. If you would like to contribute, please send patches or email to the mailing list. In particular, we could use some help writing plugins, commenting on the architecture and API, and porting to other platforms (hopefully Solaris and FreeBSD to start). We could also really use help with documentation and graphics. Reporting bugs -------------- Please do not report bugs with the bug tracking system. Report significant bugs to the mailing list at kwintv@mail.kde.org. Check www.kwintv.org for details. Please do not put in feature requests yet. We are most interested in design flaws or usability problems. PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL THE AUTHORS DIRECTLY George Staikos KWinTV Maintainer staikos@kde.org -- George Staikos _______________________________________________ kde-multimedia mailing list kde-multimedia@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-multimedia