Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[fitbrit]

Red October works very well in 90+% of cases now, I believe, and that might be an underestimate. I think there may be a way for JR to make some money from this effort, other than from sales of MC.
I'm thinking along the lines of separating Red October from the rest of MC and marketing a small, just-works directshow player, which will play all the formats that the kids are downloading from bittorrent, newsgroups etc. This is a HUGE market and shouldn't be underestimated.

MPC-HC does this for free, but in order to use LAV codecs or madVR there are things that one has to do that would put off a newb. After the free 15-day trial, RedOctoberPlayer has to be bought. For $20, the RedOctober Player would be an install once and forget piece of software, updating through update channels. You can choose between Standard and HQ settings with a single radio button.
Videos (or music) is played back simply by selecting in Windows Explorer and double-clicking, or adding to playing now via contextual menu. No libraries to worry about or display, but it could act as a DLNA renderer too.
For just an additional $20-$30 one could upgrade to the full MC, which organises your media, does DSPs, plug-ins and even edits photos.

[rjm]

Not at all disagreeing with you, just trying to understand.
Can you provide a couple examples of media that a standalone RO would play better than VLC?

[fitbrit]

Sure:

MKV, which is really the BIG one. RO can play it with hardware acceleration, MadVR (with CUDA acceleration if there's nVidia hardware), subtitles and allow multichannel decoding of HD audio, or bitstreaming to an AVR.
I don't think any other player can do this without having to set up some codecs. To emphasise this, I reformatted my media room HTPC today and the only media related software I installed was MC16. I was immediately able to play videos in ROHQ mode, 1080p videos with DTS-HD MA audio without having to configure any codecs whatsoever. All of it was installed by MC16 automatically.

The best VLC can do, AFAIK is to play 1080p mkvs with hardware acceleration... but with 7.1 lossless bitstreaming? No. With subtitles as well as hardware acceleration - I doubt it. With a fairly nice, usable OSD that doesn't break MadVR Exclusive mode - not a chance!
Only MPC-HC comes close, but to get the best quality out of it, one must download and configure MadVR, and FFDSHOW or LAV Audio. If you have nVidia hardware, one might want to get LAV CUVID too.

[rjm]

Got it, thanks. I don't have a home theater so it was not obvious to me.

[TMA-1]

I have not fiddle much with video playback lately but I worked with it pretty much a while ago when I built my HTPC and I remember it was not easy to get DTS-HD MA to bitstream without either using Power DVD or Total Media Theater together with specific hardware.  
fitbrit, is it possible to get DTS-HD MA bitstream over HDMI from a blu-ray with RO?

[jmone]

....with DTS-HD MA audio without having to configure any codecs whatsoever. All of it was installed by MC16 automatically.

FYI - if you are decoding that DTS-MA stream you need to manually add the Arcsoft dtsdecoder.dll to the LAVFilter directory if you want full bitrate/depth over just the core.

[bil1010105]

I like the idea, but the "market" isn't the kids who download from torrent and newsgroups. That's the user base - not the market.

If people are downloading stuff from torrent and newsgroups, they're not going to pay for the vast majority of software they own. Just the way it is.

I, however, would pay for something like this - because I don't use MC as my HTPC solution, and I find codec configuration a real pain.

[flac.rules]

I like the idea, but the "market" isn't the kids who download from torrent and newsgroups. That's the user base - not the market.

If people are downloading stuff from torrent and newsgroups, they're not going to pay for the vast majority of software they own. Just the way it is.

I, however, would pay for something like this - because I don't use MC as my HTPC solution, and I find codec configuration a real pain.

Not paying for the vast majority is less important than how much thay actually pay for, if you pay for 10 progs, its no bigger or lesser market if you in addition download 1000 additional programs than if you don't  download anything.

However i must admit i am scpetical to the finacial gain, most people won't see the big difference over VLC. I am unsure if the combination "easy player with no bells and wistles and needs top notch quality playback" is huge.

[glynor]

My thoughts?

Meh.

A lot of work.  Not much reward potential, and could possibly split the user base of MC.

[fitbrit]

My thoughts?

Meh.

A lot of work.  Not much reward potential, and could possibly split the user base of MC.

I was so hoping we could be friends, glynor.

I wondered how much work it would be. I didn't think it would split MC users, because I don't have the impression that there are many current users who bought the full application only to use just the video component of it.

As for the reward potential, that's definitely an unknown. At first I thought it would be a cool little freebee like Media Jukebox i.e. would play all video formats without doing all the library stuff. However, I don't think that many people coming form this route would buy the full application unless there were some kind of automated media metadata scraping built into the full version of MC.

[JustinChase]

Wouldn't the sale of a bundle of free filters/packages be wrong though?

the setup of it all is the 'trick', and the just-works playback, which is mostly the "product" of Red October i think.  But it's very much based on the free efforts of others to make it actually work (LAVFilters, MadVR, ffdshow, etc), so I'm not sure it's the "right" thing to profit from.

MC is a much bigger animal, and deserves to be sold as a product, even though it leverages these same tools, as Red October is a very small (but important) part of MC.

Just my $.02

[Hendrik]

I've had the dream to write my own player for quite a while already, which would of course be built around all my filters - which would give me the opportunity to auto-configure them properly, and combine all user-relevant settings into the players configuration dialog - basically doing a RO like thing, as much playback out of the box as i can get it to do.

Of course, i wouldn't sell it. I'm a strong believer in Open Source...

But its all a dream - so much cool things i could code, and only such a limited free time. Its kinda sad that there are so few capable open-source DirectShow developers.

[fitbrit]

Wouldn't the sale of a bundle of free filters/packages be wrong though?

the setup of it all is the 'trick', and the just-works playback, which is mostly the "product" of Red October i think.  But it's very much based on the free efforts of others to make it actually work (LAVFilters, MadVR, ffdshow, etc), so I'm not sure it's the "right" thing to profit from.

MC is a much bigger animal, and deserves to be sold as a product, even though it leverages these same tools, as Red October is a very small (but important) part of MC.

Just my $.02

It would only be with the blessing of the open-source developers, of course. Perhaps they'd get a percentage too to help support their efforts? The problem with MC is that since it's not a free program, it can run into licencing problems with open-source initiatives like IMDB etc. Free programs are able to use scraping tools to collect info from IMDB, but MC can't do it directly. At least in the case of Red October, the open source guys are working closely with JRiver.

[Mark_A_W]

FYI - if you are decoding that DTS-MA stream you need to manually add the Arcsoft dtsdecoder.dll to the LAVFilter directory if you want full bitrate/depth over just the core.

For Red October, is this the correct folder?

"C:\Users\Mark\AppData\Roaming\J River\Media Center 17\Plugins\lav"


And how can you tell it's working?  The filter properties for LAV Audio is greyed out, so I can check the status (it should say 8 /0 x 63f, 24 bit for a full 7.1 track).

I think it's working ok based on the description in DSP Studio, but that is one step removed from the actual decoder....