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

[Måns Rullgård]

"Fran?ois Revol" <revol at free.fr> writes:

>> > 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,

You really do crack me up sometimes...

> 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.

If memory serves, it was an ATI Mach64 card, well supported by XF86
and all mswindows versions at the time.

> 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.

B/W is bad compared to 32-bit colour, any 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.

Examples, please.

> And I still can't figure out drag-n-drop and clipboard in Gnome. (it 
> used to work better in Solaris with X11 apps...)

I agree that Gnome is a complete disaster, and I won't touch it with a
barge pole.  Plain old X and ICCCM stuff usually works quite well, and
I never saw a useful case for drag-n-drop.

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mans at mansr.com