Fundamental Change - Ability to incorporate music mpeg or avi files

[hatmandu]

I have been trialling Music Bee as an alternative to Windows Media Player and while the library configuration appears to have the flexibility I am looking for - unless I a missing something - its major downfall is that it doesn't cater for music video? ie avi files or mpeg2, mpeg4 files?

The capability is there to have the additional functionality of a fantastic video jukebox as well, showing the music video in the Now Playing screen.

Can this be done in a future release please.

[lynott]

Nooo, God no. Let's keep MB bloat free and perfect as it is. There are plenty of movie players out there, but there is only one music player worth using

[infogulch]

lynott, I see your point completely and I think MB needs to stay away from playing video to keep the bloat down.

BUT many people have music videos as well and even though they are videos I would still consider them part of one's music collection.

So I'm thinking that MuiscBee can stay bloat-free if it indexes and organizes music videos but instead of having an internal player, it
outsources the actual playing of the video to an external video player.

It could be limited one specific player (yay VLC!) or maybe the classic "Choose your program to do X: (or command line)" kinda thing.

It could be shown in the video player's window, or if we wanted to get fancy I think VLC is embeddable... (I still wouldn't consider it bloat, because it's done by a different program and it's optional)

[hatmandu]

Playing music without the video is like reading a story and missing some chapters.  You are not getting the full story.

Artists can express their work/ lyrics/ message in their song further through the video (or not).   Some classic examples who do are Peter Gabriel, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac, Gwen Stefani and more recently Lady Ga Ga.  Of course some videos are used in a provocative manner to enhance sales and are not potentially just about 'the music' - Mariah Carey, pussycat dolls & yes Lady Ga Ga may be examples here

But at the risk of bursting a few bubbles, make no mistake that music is not complete music without the video.  From the video you glean the age/experience/ maturity/ style/ personality of the artist, a feel of the trends at the time, it shows the way the artist engages with the audience and vice versa (live clips) - things you can't fully appreciate listening to an audio track only.
 
Software like Jaangle seems to have overcome the 'bloat factor' by incorporating video well but falls down in other areas where MB is better.  WMP treats all video like a cinema movie and a music video artist must be tagged as an "actor"!  The video files are a separate category and not integrated into the music collection searches & filters properly.   To deter people using MB as a "media player" you siimpy set the video tagging options just like audio - an artist iremains an artist not an actor, & have no fields that lend themselves to movies.  That way you are only catering for music video.

I agree with not bloating the performance of the software and configuring video as a 'plug-in' or option so that music non-conisseurs can switch on/off.   But you want the video frame incorporated as an optional frame in the sotware like Jaangle. 

I've been collecting music video from VHS to the latest HD digital technology and have a lot of audio only files as well so I'm not just all about video - but it just seems a shame that a product with so much potential doesn't  allow the for the full dimension of music. 

The above is all my opinion and I am just one voice...(thank God I hear a lot of you say...)

Steve will ultimately decide if he wants to take the product to the extra dimension of video. -the potential is there to make this product unbelievably good for a wider range of music lovers.   

[ferongr]

Lots of artistic stuff

Video playback requires a wholly different underlying framework to be created in a player. Not only you have to redesign the UI to incorporate them, but you also have to support the decoder framework (DirectShow or WMF, usually the former or both) or bundle a decoder like ffdshow with the application itself. The first option implies a whole new code component needed to be written, with its own painfull debugging period. The second option would mean Steven would have to pay royalties to groups like MPEG-LA in order to legally be able to incorporate decoders into Musicbee. It's the same for reason the AAC decoder is not bundled with the application

Taking in account that Musicbee is written in VB.NET, and that it uses a premade decoder library to decode and render audio to the soundsystem, it would seem that Steven does not have the ability or time to get down and dirty doing low-level stuff. And I don't blame him. Incorporating a decoder framework like DirectShow would mean 10x the work that would be needed just for the sound functions. From reliably loading filter, to creating pingraphs and connecting them propery and rendering video, while at the same time more optimizations would be needed for fluid video playback.

And since the application is mostly a "UI" around the BASS libraries and other linked tools (mp3gain, decoder etc), written in a managed language (where, no matter how you optimize your code, it will never be that fast), what you're basically is a total from-the-ground-up rewrite in a differenent language. You're basically asking for another program.

Sorry, but I dont see it happening.

/Lots of technical stuff

[Steven]

there is a new BASS plugin pretty much ready that i will make use of - probably not till early next year though.
I plan to do this as an optional plugin to musicbee as i know there are some very different extremes of opinions about having video with music players.
I guess in the interim i could do infogulch's suggestion as that shouldnt involve very much change at all

[infogulch]

Steven, what about the new bass lib is relevant in this topic? I mean it's interesting (<3 updates) but I don't understand how it relates.

Personally I think it would be stupid for steven to try to build his own decoder by hand when there are so many libraries and excellent video players out there that support so many different formats and are already optimized and thoroughly tested and debugged.

Ferongr, if you had read the topic you would have seen my post about using an external program for decoding in which I underlined and italic'd the point of using an external video decoder. This would essentially add another "linked tool" that MB would be a UI for.

[Maleko12]

To answer infogulch, the developer of BASS is making a video playback library. Here's a quote for all of the new features (http://surodev.com/?page_id=22):

-any media playback(requier necesary codec installed)

-plays multiple videos at once

-Extract audio

-Streaming file from internet

-Plugins Support

-Text Overlay Support

-VMR,VMR9,EVR support

-Audio Pitching

-Color Controls(brightness,hue,saturation,contrast)

-Mixing Videos Support

-DVD playback

-audio effects (via BASS)

-Multiple Video OutPut(up to then 10 video windows at once)

-Capture Devices Support

-Converter Capabilities

-multi video output

[infogulch]

Nice! I wasn't aware.   

[Steven]

just an update on this.
The BASS plugin hasnt proved to be stable and the developer is reworking it using a different technolgy. He has a beta of the new approach but i expect again it would need a few months to stabalise

[VX]

The plugin looks very promising. I second the conclusions of the topic when it comes to video support in MB. BTW, let me ask one more question: is there any chance that the plugin allow to convert a video file to audio one (especially flash to mp3)

[Sarge]

Nooo, God no. Let's keep MB bloat free and perfect as it is. There are plenty of movie players out there, but there is only one music player worth using

I totally agree with ^...It's one of the reasons I left MM is because of thier new incorporation of video, I tried the new release and my CPUsage went sky high. If I wanna watch a video there is so many other outlets that do just video good.
Keep it lean and mean 

[Steven]

sarge, this is something i am quite aware of and the video will be implemented as an optional plugin, so you wont have to have it loaded.
its as i said before, i know some people have strong opinions against video in music players but there are others who think it should be.
I will always keep MB focused primarily on music as thats where my interest is.

[Sarge]

sarge, this is something i am quite aware of and the video will be implemented as an optional plugin, so you wont have to have it loaded.
its as i said before, i know some people have strong opinions against video in music players but there are others who think it should be.
I will always keep MB focused primarily on music as thats where my interest is.

Ahhh now that's  ^ Music to my ears.

[antiPOP]

I'm also against the video support.