MOC

I had set myself the goal of getting MOC 2.5-beta2 out during the month of September, but despite my best intentions real world concerns have managed to interfere once again with the MOC Master Plan. read more

I had set myself the goal of getting MOC 2.5-beta2 out during the month of September, but despite my best intentions real world concerns have managed to interfere once again with the MOC Master Plan. We really need to get MOC 2.5.0 out because it ... [More] will form a stable base from which MOC can move forward. Once it is, the various contributions which have been on hold for what seems like forever can be merged into the code base and made publicly available. Then there are a number of mechanisms which need to be put in place to support upcoming new features. Finally, we can start introducing that new functionality. I'm really looking forward to that new work, and it's frustrating not to be able to get on to it. Not only is it more rewarding to work on than bug fixing, but it also addresses a lot of those odds and ends that people have asked for over the years and provides some much improved capabilities for MOC users. It may not appear that much effort is going into MOC any more, but that's far from the truth and there is much going on which isn't publicly visible. Many of those new features are well advanced but there's still a lot left to be done. MOC does have a future, but it's a small team and there are many demands on the time of its members. Some weeks MOC gets a lot of attention, other weeks... not so much. Forums: General discussion [Less]

Forums: General discussion I had set myself the goal of getting MOC 2.5-beta2 out during the month of September, but despite my best intentions real world concerns have managed to interfere once again with the MOC Master Plan. We really need to ... [More] get MOC 2.5.0 out because it will form a stable base from which MOC can move forward. Once it is, the various contributions which have been on hold for what seems like forever can be merged into the code base and made publicly available. Then there are a number of mechanisms which need to be put in place to support upcoming new features. Finally, we can start introducing that new functionality. I'm really looking forward to that new work, and it's frustrating not to be able to get on to it. Not only is it more rewarding to work on than bug fixing, but it also addresses a lot of those odds and ends that people have asked for over the years and provides some much improved capabilities for MOC users. It may not appear that much effort is going into MOC any more, but that's far from the truth and there is much going on which isn't publicly visible. Many of those new features are well advanced but there's still a lot left to be done. MOC does have a future, but it's a small team and there are many demands on the time of its members. Some weeks MOC gets a lot of attention, other weeks... not so much. [Less]

In the run up to Christmas I thought I'd give you all a run down on how progress on MOC is running before you run away for the Christmas break. As you'll be aware, MOC 2.5-beta1 was released in mid-October and has now been picked up by several ... [More] distributions. Several bugs have been reported. Their very existence implies that they weren't detected during pre-release testing and so it's not surprising that most cannot be reproduced locally and have to be debugged by e-mail, which is a time-consuming process. With the new release, some new clues about old bugs have become available (particularly on screen upsets caused by the mishandling of non-ASCII characters). The major ones are now solved but the remaining ones will have to wait for the next release. New development work has highlighted additional problem areas and these too are being worked on. Audio files exceeding 2GiB in size or having a similarly large number of samples are proving an especially fertile bug hunting ground. Once these issues have been resolved MOC 2.5-beta2 will be released, but the progress towards it is slower than I would have hoped. MOC's small band of developers and pre-commit testers has also grown a little with the addition of Tomasz Golinski, who has been a long-time contributor, undertaking to maintain the MOC web site content and information about MOC found on external web sites. He has in mind to make some rearrangements, so look for some web site changes in the near future. It will be good to have the web site tracking MOC developments more closely. I'm hoping that in the coming month we will gain the services a MOC user who has volunteered to act as MOC Contributions Coordinator if and when his studies permit. This will be of significant benefit to the MOC user community as he will be able to harvest the contributions currently scattered throughout the Forum and place those still relevant in one common location where they can be kept current. Through him I am also hoping to provide pre-commit patchsets so users who wish to explore unreleased functionality will be able to do so. Thank you to all those who have contributed to MOC in the past whether through bug reports, the discussion of ideas, testing or actual code, and I hope you will continue to do so in the future. Your support is very much appreciated. Finally, let me wish all MOC users a very relaxing holiday season to the accompaniment of your favourite music. John Fitzgerald. MOC Maintainer. Forums: General discussion [Less]

In the run up to Christmas I thought I'd give you all a run down on how progress on MOC is running before you run away for the Christmas break. As you'll be aware, MOC 2.5-beta1 was released in mid-October and has now been picked up by several ... [More] distributions. Several bugs have been reported. Their very existence implies that they weren't detected during pre-release testing and so it's not surprising that most cannot be reproduced locally and have to be debugged by e-mail, which is a time-consuming process. With the new release, some new clues about old bugs have become available (particularly on screen upsets caused by the mishandling of non-ASCII characters). The major ones are now solved but the remaining ones will have to wait for the next release. New development work has highlighted additional problem areas and these too are being worked on. Audio files exceeding 2GiB in size or having a similarly large number of samples are proving an especially fertile bug hunting ground. Once these issues have been resolved MOC 2.5-beta2 will be released, but the progress towards it is slower than I would have hoped. MOC's small band of developers and pre-commit testers has also grown a little with the addition of Tomasz Golinski, who has been a long-time contributor, undertaking to maintain the MOC web site content and information about MOC found on external web sites. He has in mind to make some rearrangements, so look for some web site changes in the near future. It will be good to have the web site tracking MOC developments more closely. I'm hoping that in the coming month we will gain the services a MOC user who has volunteered to act as MOC Contributions Coordinator if and when his studies permit. This will be of significant benefit to the MOC user community as he will be able to harvest the contributions currently scattered throughout the Forum and place those still relevant in one common location where they can be kept current. Through him I am also hoping to provide pre-commit patchsets so users who wish to explore unreleased functionality will be able to do so. Thank you to all those who have contributed to MOC in the past whether through bug reports, the discussion of ideas, testing or actual code, and I hope you will continue to do so in the future. Your support is very much appreciated. Finally, let me wish all MOC users a very relaxing holiday season to the accompaniment of your favourite music. John Fitzgerald. MOC Maintainer. Forums: General discussion [Less]

In the run up to Christmas I thought I'd give you all a run down on how progress on MOC is running before you run away for the Christmas break. read more

I've started nearly every week for the last three months thinking that by the weekend the next release of MOC would be out. But each week, for one reason or another, it kept on not happening... until now! read more

I've started nearly every week for the last three months thinking that by the weekend the next release of MOC would be out. But each week, for one reason or another, it kept on not happening... until now! It's been a long time in the making, but ... [More] we're proud to announce the release of MOC 2.5.0-beta1. This version has been the subject of a great amount of development and consequently a great amount of testing, so we're expecting that the stable MOC 2.5.0 version will follow shortly. Of course, any reported problems will be investigated and fixed if possible before the stable release, but no new functionality will be added before then. Changes in this release can be summarised as: Autotools and packaging changes, Improved support for embedded systems, New and changed audio driver capabilities, New and changed audio decoders, Overhaul of the FFmpeg/LibAV decoder, New and improved audio reproduction features and fixes, General configuration file changes, New and changed configuration file options, New command line options, Screen handling changes and fixes, New and updated client interaction features, Improved text entry history and editting, Theme changes and fixes, General code cleaning, Significant bugs fixed, and Many miscellaneous improvements and fixes. See the included NEWS file for more details and the SVN log for exact details. For this release we have created a new MOC Release Signing Key and the source tarball will be signed using this new key. The key is signed by both Damian Pietras (who used his key personal to sign the previous releases) and myself so that should go some way to assuring you of its authenticity. pub 2048R/2885A7AA 2012-10-02 Key fingerprint = 5935 9B80 406D 9E73 E805 99BE F312 1E4F 2885 A7AA uid MOC Release Signing Key sub 2048R/E6D3B213 2012-10-02 John Fitzgerald, MOC Maintainer. Release: Development release. [Less]

User tomaszg and I have put some time into investigating the supposed tags cache corruption problem for which the accepted wisdom has been to delete the MOC tags cache. It has actually turned out to be a problem with stale database locks left over ... [More] after a previous server crash, and I have today committed a patch (r2492) which I believe fixes it. The Symptoms The client freezes. The server continues playing but does not respond to commands. Neither the server nor the client can be shut down gracefully. Verification read more [Less]

I have today made a series of commits (r2383 to r2410) to SVN which represent a major overhaul of the FFmpeg/LibAV decoder. The decoder now supports a number of additional audio formats (including the requested WV and APE), and several video formats (AVI, FLV, MP4, REC and VOB) from which the audio will be played. read more