A peek through the chrystal ball: qt 2.0

Introduction

Several people has mailed me asking when I'll release a new version of qt, and could I please add this or that feature etc. Well, to save myself the hassle of answering any more of these, I thought I'd create this webpage to let you guys know the direction of my current work on qt.

News! This page is now an indication that the next version of qt is completed, and has been submitted to AmiNet. It is available in the gfx/show drawer, from whence the previous version (1.4) has now been removed. This page should probably disappear soon, as the information contained herein should be integrated with the normal qt page.

About qt 2.0

qt 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch. It contains virtually no code from qt 1.x, and absolutely no code borrowed from XAnim. This is to ensure a more structured design, and hopefully fewer bugs. qt 2.0 is based on a modular system where new modules can be easily plugged in, facilitating addition of new codecs, renderers etc.

New features

• Streamed replay
  qt 2.0 will play movies directly from hard disk/CD-ROM.
• OCS/ECS support
  qt 2.0 will run on OCS and ECS machines, as well as machines with AGA/CyberGraphX. Also, Kickstart 2.04 will be sufficient to run qt 2.0, although Kickstart3.0+ is recommended.
• OCS/ECS/AGA Public Screen replay
  qt 2.0 will be able to replay a movie on any public screen, not just true colour ones.
• Improved performance
  qt 2.0 uses more efficient codec implementations, and can skip frames in a far better way (no more "black screen" replays).
• Transport control GUI
  qt 2.0 will contain a GUI that can be used to pause, rewind, seek in, and generally muck about with the movie.
• File output
  qt 2.0 will be able to save the sound and picture frames of a movie to files. File formats are ILBM(24) and 8SVX.
• Double buffering
  Private screen replays on OCS/ECS/AGA are now double-buffered, to avoid bitplane update glitches.

Subsequent versions

Below are some features that will definitely be put off until qt 2.1 at earliest:

• PowerPC support
  Support for using a PPC processor will be added at some point.
• AVI replay
  I do have some basic specis for the AVI format, so I might add an AVI frontend in some later version.