Finally I managed to make some time to work this out.

Except the change on the look, I’d like to introduce some interesting changes internally.

1. Partial update.

By far, The most issues I have received is that MPlayerX was unable to play some file. Most of the time, such issue is not related with MPlayerX itself, but ffmpeg or mplayer which works as the player core inside of MPlayerX.

So I introduced this so called Partial Update into 1.1.0, which enable me to update the ffmpeg/mplayer part without updatig the whole app. Hopfully It could help me to update the player core to resolve your playback issues more quickly.

Last year was a tremendous year for me, my first kid was given birth ( actually I’d rather say MPX is my first child :)), work made me busier and busier, I was never happier and busier than before.

Taking a look back, the only down thing is that I didn’t have much time on making much progress on my “first child” as before, even I didn’t have much time to enjoy my best favorite movies. The only one I didn’t miss is Interstellar, which gave me 3 hours peace and enjoyment in mind.

I was hesitating once, as seeing more and more people are now spending more and more time on their iPhones and Androids, I wondered how much it is still meaningful to make progress on the desktop application. Until one day, I captured my kid by HandyCam, edited it and played it on TV, and the other day, I waited for minutes to see the video in youtube, and another day, I found I need to analyze a video frame by frame… I found mobile phone is still not that powerful and versatile to accomplish such tasks. I knew I need to continue my efforts on MPlayerX to keep the wonderful user experience that my iPhone could not.

Now I have made 50+ patches, make MPlayerX more adoptable to Yosemite, fix several bugs, upgrading the new core to support https and latest protocol of youtube. Hope I could release it before 10.11 is coming.

The other thing is that, MPlayerX will start to utilize the installer to fulfil monetization. I knew it may bring many negative comments, but honestly it is the best way to keep the developer motivated. For anyone who cares about this, please check the installer and make sure only install MPX, then it should be no difference with the old way.

Recently I got a chance to work on a new project which needs utilize the network, such as HTTP protocol, socket programming, etc.

I was a newbie about this topic, so I found myself a book as the guide book for network programming. It is “iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook”.

As the title indicated, it is a cookbook for someone like me, who has the programming basis on OSX/iOS, and wants to take a quick look at the network programming especially.

This book explained how to program in OSX/iOS at several levels, from the lowest BSD socket layer to the highest AFNetworking library.

BSD socket library provides you the lowest level and most flexibility, however this also means you have to everything yourself. If you just want to use the latest HTTP technology, such as json, plist data transferring and analysis, there are better choices on OSX/iOS, such as AFNetworking, MKNetworkKit. These libraries are purely Objective-C, modern designed, and should be much easier to use than BSD library’s C API.

There are also several sample code shown in the book, basically a web server and client implementation is demonstrated, by utilizing each level of technology. These sample code self-explained how to implement the network programming, also help the readers to understand which technology should be their best choice.

MPlayerX supports to decode the video with Hardware Accelerated Decoder (HAD). This feature uses your modern GPU to decode video frame, so that free your CPU for other tasks, and decrease the power consumption in the meantime, hopefully.

Currently, there is no easy way to turn on/off the HAD. And ideally, this feature should be transparent to users, and HAD should be always turned on.

However, the development on HAD is still in the preliminary stage, sometimes HAD may fail to decode the frame and even cause MPlayerX’s core crash.

If you found MPlayerX failed to play some H264, MP4, MPEG2, AVC contents, please try the following instructions to turn off HAD.

In previous versions, MPlayerX could play the videos in Youtube.com directly.

However, you have to copy the URL → open MPlayerX → open URL panel → paste the URL, kind of annoying and even stop myself using this feature.

From 1.0.21, MPlayerX simplifies the usage much more, furthermore, vimeo, youku, Instagram are getting supported.

Here is how to:

As a Sparkled application, MPlayerX needs an automatic count-up mechanism between versions.

1. Count up git versions

Git doesn’t provide version number, it only gives out checksum of the commits, so let’s make one.

网上类似的文章数不胜数，并且有想法自己搞这些开源玩意儿的同学想必水平也应该都在我之上，我本不该多此一举。不过记得当初为了编译出一个能够完全胜任MPlayerX的核心，我还是费了相当一些周折，这些周折如果在网上仔细调查也能得到答案，不过将它们总结到一起的文章，我还没有发现。所以我就做一个搬运工，把它们放到一起供有兴趣的同学翻阅。

我会尽力在我水平之内照顾到这篇文章的通用性，但请恕我精力有限，如果有什么出错的地方请和我联系。

Some users said they have duplicated menu items in their “Open With …” of the contextual menu, looks like

Some users want more settings, some users want more simplicity.

I think exposing all the settings in the software and stacking them to the GUI is a bad choice. Not only complicating the GUI is bad, making users make the unimportant choice is even worse.

Well, this is my choice of design.

For who does want some feature which is not available in GUI, you may find it here.

MPlayerX supports Shell script command line and AppleScript as its integration to the OS.

• For Shell script

Usage:

1

open -a /path/to/MPlayerX.app --args -name1 value1 -name2 value2 ...