[FFmpeg-devel] [OT] Re: libossupport status

[François Revol]

> > How many people around here have actually seen BeOS in action?  I 
> > have
> > never used it, but i have at least seen it 10 years or so ago.
> 
> I too have never used it, only seen it, also some 10 years ago.  What
> immediately struck me about it was that the graphics would only work
> in b/w on then-current hardware.  And that from something being 
> touted

Which is actually a feature, it was chosen to use 4bpp VGA instead of 
256 colors QVGA mode or a non-standard VGA-X for unsupported cards to 
have a decent desktop space. Since <8bpp wasn't supported by the 
app_server the driver was downscaling it to 4bpp as gray levels to not 
look too ugly (did you really prefer windows98 in 16 colors ??)
And if your card supported VESA it would have used the best mode 
available, degrading the preformances as less as possible.
It was also a time with loads of different gfx card brands and models, 
loads of chips for which only win 3.1 had a driver. I do remember some 
XFree config nightmares... one server per card... when it was ever 
supported. Here at least it would just work if supported, and do the 
best effort else. Which isn't that bad for that epoch.
And even with the years-old R5 I've not seen a gray screen for quite 
some time, as most cards sold today support VESA. And there are ati and 
nv drivers for Haiku that even run in R5 thanks to binary 
compatibility. Try retrofitting recent nv drivers to a 5 years old 
linux+XFree install.
And Win XP still goes down to 4bpp VGA when unsupported AFAIK...

> as a "multimedia OS". 

On some aspects it still beats the crap out of Linux, despite the 10-
times slower syscalls.
And I still can't figure out drag-n-drop and clipboard in Gnome. (it 
used to work better in Solaris with X11 apps...)

> Needless to say, I never gave it a second
> thought.

You could try Haiku but I suppose you won't.

Fran?ois.