16 May 2001   Robert Basler is the president of Aurora Systems, Inc. and a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day. If you have a comment about the content of this article, please feel free to vent in the OS/2 eZine discussion forums.

Previous Article Home Next Article Modern Multimedia is Finally Arriving! Warp vision The neatest thing I saw this month for OS/2 is the new DivX ;-) movie player being developed in Russia. This thing is really slick so far and developing fast. They have both sound and video working, they just have to get them synchronized now. The really neat thing about it is that it uses Odin and the Windows DivX ;-) codec to actually do the decoding. If they can get this all working, it should make it possible for other Windows codecs to come to OS/2. To test it out I found a DivX ;-) format movie trailers site. As you can see, it works like a charm (make sure you get a current Odin, older builds don't do sound.) [Image from trailer copyright Paramount Pictures Corporation.] This is another project from the Russian OS/2 site OS2.ru. This is a site for developers, but they have a lot of interesting projects on the go. WarpMedia Technology Preview A couple days after Warp vision appeared, the new WarpMedia Technology Preview from the Software Developers Guild which plays MPEG-1 and DivX ;-) video as well as MP3 audio was released. It is a bit further along, having support for start/stop/rewind etc. plus it supports skins and fullscreen and TV output. I wasn't able to get their first release to run, it hung my machine. After a number of people had the same problem, they added a /NOFS option which made their updated beta run alright, however my system doesn't run 32-bit color so no screenshot of it playing video yet. I'll be looking forward to the next update. RealPlayer 8 We've talked about RealPlayer 7 in Odin before but in case you missed it, the folks at Odin have also got RealPlayer 8 working pretty well as well. It is capable of playing back .RAM files you download, as well as streaming video and audio content from the web as shown below.

Quicktime Another multimedia goodie that resurfaced this month is the original OS/2 Quicktime player developed by Apple and IBM oh so many years ago. It plays older Quicktime .MOV files and you can get it at TUCOWS. I'm still waiting for a solution that will let me view the movie trailers at Apple's Movie Trailers site. More Changes If you're still a 640x480 reader, it's time to think about a higher resolution. I've been struggling to make everything fit onto a 640x480 screen the last few months with not much success. Starting this month I'm admitting defeat and bumping the magazine design up to 800x600. Many of our writers run high-resolution screens and the screenshots never look very good when we shrink them to fit the eZine. For readers, it is a pain to have to click to see them full-size. For me, it saves me a bunch of time on layout and on resizing images. I hope you'll enjoy the nicer look. Interesting Website of the Month I ran across the eCStacy website this month. I think it's good to see OS/2 users with an attitude, but if you have delicate sensibilities, you might want to skip it. The site includes some interesting downloads, new user help, and some cool graphics in the Gallery and Boot Logos sections. Help Support the OS/2 eZine Last issue I won a copy of Junk Spy 2.0, and R. Bret Walker got a copy of CoolFM. Thanks to the advertisers for their continuing support. I hope you'll take the time to click through for a look at our advertisers' products. If you're interested in winning some prizes yourself and you feel like writing for us, have a look at the OS/2 eZine Press Room. Thanks to Pete Grubbs A special thanks to Pete Grubbs for taking care of the eZine while I was on vacation. Things seem to have gone well. OS/2 e-Zine is committed to serving the OS/2 community by providing accurate, useful, and timely information every month. We will deliver user-oriented hardware and software reviews, thoughtful editorial comment, and 'how-to' articles which will include useful tips for both the novice and the experienced OS/2 user.

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