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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.'"
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yet another example of pixie-dust projects...
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
Wait, does this mean that we're supposed to... like... AOL?
:^(
But... it just feels wrong somehow...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Anyone know how portable the code is? Any chance we could see milkdrop for xmms (yes I know there are clones around, none of them are as good as the original).
I am trolling
They created Mozilla as open source.
This is probably the number 1 open source program on Windows.
'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.' It could rival in pure numbers, but I'd bet that MOST AOL users don't really understand or care what open source is. Most people who do stay clear of AOL to begin with.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
More competition is a good thing (and by competition I mean releasing source, and striving to compete with the likes of mozilla, as opposed to being just a rotting corporation that no geek would bother with).
AOL does contribute to useful open source software. AOL developers contribute to SQLite and have helped produce numerous useful additions to SQLite.
Quote: The primary purpose for version 3.2.0 is to add support for ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN. The new ADD COLUMN capability is made possible by AOL developers supporting and embracing great open-source software. Thanks, AOL!
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.'
Just use XMPP you retards.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Personally, I'm very surprised that virus and worm makers haven't homed in on IM clients yet. I imagine AOL will be very hard hit when they do. Although, an open source AIM client that really was bigger than Mozilla might be able to turn that around.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I can rush out now and subscribe to AOL. I was just waiting for them to support open source. I'll be the first guy in my lug to have an AOL address. I rock.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
I just look at WinAmp and shake my head. There's a programme that could have been iTMS before such a thing even existed. It could still be iTMS rival now, two years too late. And the integrated NSV means it could deliver TV and VOD too with a little work. So why the hell isn't it?
Because AOL is run by a bunch of geniuses.
Maybe now AIM file transfers will work reliably in gaim.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Oh HELL YA! Milkdrop has got to be THE best plug-in developed. Geiss is genius. How he is able to program the AI to do the things Milkdrop does just blows me away. And now, it's open source! Sweet mother of holy bliss!
http://www.geisswerks.com/
Life is not for the lazy.
Upward, rather than forward!
And always...twirling, twirling, TWIRLING!
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
I guess they're too busy with their RIAA and MPAA initiatives to worry about attacking open source.
So ok, AOL is all 'bout open source now. Then why is it there is no official aol client for linux?
My mother uses aol, and I have to spend ages fixing security issues in windows and generally keeping it going. I'd far rather she used Linux for the web, she'd be safe from 99% of all web exploits, and it would make admin easier for me. Plus I wouldn't have to keep cleaning up all the garbage windows collects on her system.
It took long enough to get her on the web, weaning her from aol is not something I can do. The simplest solution by far is for aol to have native linux support (note, I mean official support, not the linux aol dialer projects)
I was disappointed that development of Milkdrop had died two years ago. At least now it will be able to be under development again, which is a good thing considering it's my favourite vis and the favourite vis of all of my friends nerdy enough to know what a vis is (and aware that Winamp actually has preferences to change it). :P
I remember when I first started using it my computer was a Pentium 233 with 64MB of RAM, but since I had a 3D graphics card it ran at a reasonable framerate and I have been hooked since. It especially complements Pink Floyd's DSotM, but now I'm getting too offtopic
- Wilson
Reasons Why Milkdrop Kicks Ass:
It's time to learn how to port that sucker to the *Nixes (Linux, BSD, OS X)! I haven't been in Windows enough to enjoy it for a very long time.
I know we have the likes of AmaroK, XMMS...but none of these does any video!
Does this mean Freeamp can start using its own name again? AOL made them change their name to Zinf or something like that, and they were never heard from again. Especially since one of those directory spammers took over their "freeamp" domains, and AOL did nothing about that.
to OSS. But even more than offering OSS, they would be wise to do a Linux connection, even possibly a Linux disc. One idea would be to work with major distros geared towards the desktop such as Novell, Mandrake, and Linspire.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I know this is off-topic, but... Does anybody else see significant numbers of posts that appear to belong to other topics sprinkled throughout Slashdot today?
The other replies to "You BASTARDS" seem to belong to the article regarding IE memory leaks.
Maybe it's just my browser.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
What does AOL have to do with the open sourcing of Milkdrop? Milkdrop was written by Ryan Geiss, the supergenius who wrote the old skool 'Geiss' screen saver. It totally rocks, and according to geisswerks.com, he opened the code up almost a month ago now.
But I can't see how that anything to do with AOL, other than the fact that it was only a Winamp plugin before...
Any hope that WinAMP itself might go open source and
we see an up-to-date WinAMP for the Mac?
Does Midge Ure know about this?
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
NIH.
Jabber is "Not Invented Here". So that makes it worthless and crappy.
Just because they are open sourcing some of their tech does not mean that they are willing to give up on something they have invested *years* developing.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
I sincerely think slashdot should get rid of Zonk. He is not the typical editor and chooses story really badly. His also famous for putting too may dupe stories as well as deleting stories when he finds it out. Mod be down if you want, but you can look at the quality of posts when Zonk is posting here.
Which could be the cleverest thing AOL have done for a long time, depending on whether the company can muster the will to see if through to the end. MS lost money for years trying to destroy AIM and AOL. For their part, AOL lost the top spot in the messenger wars, but kept a large userbase.
By opening AIM, AOL stand to gain a lot of new users, and to force MS into re-investing in MSN just when they'd really like to divert resources back to IE.
As I say, it all depends on whether they have the will to see the process through to the end. And I suppose, upon what they mean by an "open platform". Open Source a la mozilla would be fine, but the proposal may wind up being watered down into something akin to MS's "shared source" mockery. A shame if so, since they could be onto something with this.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"let's buy netscape"
AOL buys them and now AOL has a deal with Microsoft for using IE.
later ...
aol head: "hmm that didn't work what should we do now?"
"umm. how about buy winamp for 100 million dollars"
Justin Frankel (winamp creator) resigns
5 years later ...
aol head: "we are still broke, whatever happened to that winamp stuff we bought?"
"um we are working on some cool plugins! hey maybe we could make it open source! i hear mozilla is doing well and they are open source"
aol head: "good idea, we can make aim open source too"
Erm... because it's America On-line?
the best thing AOL can do for the international community and for the Internet, is to "close source" their users .. just keep them on a sepparate "AOLNet" and everybody will be happy
;)
i'm ready to pay a monthly subscription to AOL for that !
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
see http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/ for more details.
I think it a rather poor show that AOL grabs the bragging rights. AFAIK, they had nothing to do with it!
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
it appears to be either someone, or some bot that is reposting old postings. they are either being themselves (an asshole), or it is designed to decrease the signal to noise ratio so as to drive ppl off this site. For some odd reason, I suspect the later.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who friggin' cares about those? Open Winamp so I can use it on Linux!
John Foxx is the *real* UVox singer!!
And in the past 24 hours, I've gotten notifications of moderations not reflected in the report in the moderated post itself (click the post's ID, no moderation shows).
--
make install -not war
AOL also open sourced the modified version of Midori/Mobile Linux it used on the Gateway appliance.
Hence, http://opensource.aol.com
Execute? [Y/N] _
WinAMP has been effectively dead since 5.0 came out with the exceptions of bug fixes. AOL should fund it again, or let it go F/OSS.
The milkdrop source was added to the XBMC cvs a couple of weeks ago.
It looks purty.
See Here.
And may I ask, how do you know that I don't contribute to Wiki? Because as a matter of fact I do. [...] Why don't you stop making assumptions (because you know what they say about assumptions) and take a reality check.
I'm not making assumptions, I just don't respect the "get your priorities straight / think of the children" posts (your post being an independant entity from you, btw) because they never contribute anything to the discussion. Off course there are other problems in life, more pressing, more life threatning, etc.
If you're going to say there are more pressing matters to this thread, why not write a macro that'll post the exact same thing to every. single. thread. up until such times as hunger, war and disease have been wiped out from the world? Might as well.
"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.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
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 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".
--
make install -not war
Since July of 2003 -- http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/. The author of the plugin is Ryan Geiss. His plugins are the best I have ever seen.
now we should wait for them to opensource winamp the app.
5, 4, 3, 2...
This is true in public perception, but at least for the last few years it's false in practice. Besides Mozilla, and AOLServer, and now this code, that everyone gets to see, inside AOL itself there is quite a bit of support for Open Source.
I'm not an employee of AOL proper, but I do work for the corporate behemoth of which AOL is a part. I've also got a few friends that are involved in engineering and networking at AOL specifically, and their situation is similar to mine.
We are allowed and, in most cases, encouraged to use Open Source software. A surprisingly large part of our infrastructure depends on it. We have significant in-house expertise with Linux kernel development, Apache (which we don't use exclusively, but we do roll out when the situation permits) module development, and a huge portion of our internal development work is done with Perl and Java (which isn't open per se, but we use lots of open components such Apache's Jakarta stuff).
Our management in general is supportive of Open Source, and while most of our development is specific to our environment (meaning it wouldn't be that useful to redistribute it), a lot of us contribute on our own time to various Open Source projects, which is something we couldn't do to the extent that we do if we didn't work with them extensively already to feed our families.
If you're ever in a position to come work for AOL, you'll find that they seek out people with experience with Open Source software. Work experience with visible Open Source projects on your resume will make you look good. And once you get here you'll find a culture that wants you to use those tools and that experience in the majority of what you do. For someone who really likes Open Source, in that respect it's a great place to work.
As if AOL didn't send out enough CDs already. Now they're moving towards FOSS, can "AOLoppix" be far behind?
So.. it has come to this
might we see working file transfer and file sharing in GAIM because of this?
Don't trust AOL. This new service is only cool to those that know the whole functionality of it. I think most AOL users do not know the whole functionality of ANYTHING, nor do they care. So surely this is a stunt to try to get half-wit geeks, like myself, to join the dark side. That and all these free AOL CDs.
Off topic, but does anyone remember when the US postal service tried to get a special tax established in order to cover the money they were losing, because of e-mail, and IMing? Then you go into the US Post office, and there they are, the free AOL CDs. It's a 'sham' I tell ya.
yes and we could be listening to lamapods
There's more talk about Winamp 5.x here but I noticed a few people mentioning there were forks of WA 2.x around? Was the source to 2.x released at some point and I missed it?? I'd love to get my hands on that!
AOL users don't have to understand what open source is in order to benefit from the wider range of clients available for AOL services that will be available as a result.
Two very different things - what this means is that AOL will open up it's platform to the AIM system (not client) for licensing. This is classic big company marketing spin - has nothing to do with open source or Mozilla.
AOL is clearly floundering when they have piggy back on the movement of Mozilla / Firefox. Even the abandoned but still barely breathing Netscape division of AOL is piggy backing on Mozilla / Firefox. Hell, they used to own / manage Mozilla before their brilliant executive management decided to let them go because they were clueless on what to do with Open Source technology (and thank God they did for Mozilla's (and our) sake).
Additional proof that AOL executive management for the past 10 years are complete boobs and absolutely clueless about real consumer software - AOL killed or derailed every innovative company they purchased during that time period: WinAMP, PersonaLogic, CompuServe, GNN, Netscape, Mozilla, Spinner, ShoutCast, WAIS, InfoGate, Mapquest - ICQ, MovieFone and Signingfish are they only companies they did not F-up (yet).
Heck, they launched AIM into the non-AOL member base market 8 years ago to attempt to capture more web users but completely failed due to executive managements ignorance of the market changes and lack of any strategic vision - they are doomed within the next 1-2 years.
But they do make a great mass CD marketing company with that CD distribution model and modem pool management (only after the whole America Offline debacle of course) - that is about the only two things they seem to know how to do - maybe that is their next stage (ha ha ha). CD distribution and the Internet boom of the late 90's is the only thing AOL can be thankful for - AOL has nothing of value long term.
Download AIM for Linux
Modding down anony-holes like you and me has very little point, unless the poster is a prolific griefer. But I have yet to see a subnet ban, or at least see one that makes a difference.
I hope no one wastes the points.
I don't understand something. Milkdrop is from Geisswerks. Winamp AVS is from Nullsoft, which AOL owns. I get that. I wasn't aware of any relationship between Geiss and AOL. How does AOL get credit for open sourcing Geiss' software?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
not that I think it will happen, but that would be a great idea. They would create a free distribution that is preloaded with AOL. Casual users who only need a computer for the internet could buy a box (it wouldn't need Windows), and pop in the AOLoppix cd, and sign up for AOL internet.
They will totally win the instant messaging wars if they open the AIM server, or at least a working copy of it.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Don't get me wrong, but I don't see what the hell that had to do with my comment. I don't think Milkdrop is patented, it was just closed source -- isn't that exactly what you're talking about? Copyright and licenses doing its work?
Am I wrong here -- is Milkdrop patented or something?
Me too! (just check the jargon file for AOL)
I am Spartacus
If AOL manages to do to Open source what it did to Usenet by embracing it... SCO has nothing to worry about.
AOL didn't even get you ON the Internet until they got scared by a couple of years of explosive dial-up growth. And it did so poorly, even then ... I think it was 1997.
The growth of the Internet terrified AOL. It forced them to go to "unlimited" dial-up. They were lucky to keep up long enough to stay at the top for a few short years.
XBMC already ported the open sourced milkdrop in early may. It runs well, but theres a few bugs (player skips) at random with a complex visualization like this.
The XBMC team came up with a port in about a week, so assuming the xmms core visualization code is solid, porting this wont be hard.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
XMMS has a plugin to play videos using MPlayer.
But I miss AVS.
There are some XMMS vis plugins that does something in the lines of AVS (a scriptable generic effect engine), but the real value of AVS is on the fantastic presets that comes with it.
Best visual music-listening experience ever!
However, the idea of an external program rewriting milk_msg.ini every few seconds is a less-than-perfectly-elegant solution. Better would be for milkdrop to be able to somehow receive an entire file of lyrics+timing, queue it up, and display them without any kludges. Someone please add this! It could simply be sent the filename of an LRC file, which has a timestamp and line of lyrics on each line.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I just went to their site to check it out and found that they have a sub-site dedicated to a single race of people. I was so put off by this that I forgot all about the audio/video I initially wanted to check out. Is it just me or is anyone else surprised that a corporation this size could get away with a racism of this magnitude?