AOL Open Sourcing Audio & Video Technology

daria24 writes "BetaNews says that AOL is open sourcing Winamp AVS and Milkdrop, two popular Winamp plug-ins, and its Ultravox streaming media platform (the successor to Shoutcast). 'Despite helping to launch the Mozilla Foundation and releasing the code to its AOL Server software, America Online has never been synonymous with open source. But a number of new initiatives could change AOL's proprietary image, as the company strives to reach a broader audience on the open Web.' The next-generation AIM release will also be an open platform, which AOL says 'could rival even Mozilla due to its scale and the massive AIM user base.'"

Pixie-dust projects

[Scorillo47]

Yet another example of pixie-dust projects [msdn.com]...

Other AOL Open Source

[Skynet]

AOL also open sourced the modified version of Midori/Mobile Linux it used on the Gateway appliance.

Hence, http://opensource.aol.com [aol.com]

Xbox Media Center

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

The milkdrop source was added to the XBMC cvs a couple of weeks ago.

It looks purty.

See Here [xboxmediacenter.com].

It already is

[Mitchell Mebane]

"It's great to hear Milkdrop is finally being open-sourced, let's hope projectM can work better as a result."

It already is. From the projectM home page:

5/6/05 - projectM 0.97 Released!

Nullsoft released the Milkdrop source code so I have fixed the behavior of waveforms 2, 3, & 5, zoom, and custom shapes (tex_ang and tex_zoom). I also added the Darken, Brighten, and Solarize filters. Things look much better with these added features. We also have some stability patches for xmms-projectM in this release courtesy of Richard McKnight.

So this is just the beginning. Now that the Milkdrop source is out, expect good things. This is just a quick release to show how much progess we've made in just a few days with the source. Expect more.

Player Souce/API?

[Doc Ruby]

I wish they'd open the source to the base WinAmp5 player, at least Read-Only. I've been trying for months to figure out the API for a few essential functions to make an interactive playlist plugin that replaces, or at least can be used instead of, the default playlist GUI. Wasabi [bdash.net.nz] was a project forked off WinAmp3 that released its source years ago, but that's a dead end (no codebase shared with WinAmp5).

If you've got insights, how would you implement my playlist, which lets you click Artist - Title - Album "columns" in the display of song rows, sorting the clicked column, and restyling (eg. italicizing, bolding, underlining) the font of all text only in that column? It has to 1> get the click, 2> know which row was clicked, 3> get the data from that row, 4> resort the rows in the display, 5> restyle some of the text in each row. If I can't get the coordinates of the click, I can just rotate the sort column after each click. And if I can't restyle some of the row text, I can insert "***" characters or something. And if I can't make a plugin override the default playlist (make it appear instead), I suppose I can make it a MediaLibrary plugin or something. And for real wizardry, I'd like the plugin to use WinAmp's builting HTTP client to periodically retrieve and install plugin updates from my Internet server.

I don't need the algorithms to do those things, I need the API hooks to call the rest of WinAmp to do its part. I want to call them, but I also want to trace them for debugging, as the datapath "submerges" into the main app. If AOL won't open the source to WinAmp5 entirely, maybe some Slashdotter already knows how to do it "anyway".