X●, a new x264 GUI for Mac

[Guest]

@Ankle Bond

Your posts are uninformed and inflammatory. I followed the Celluloid thread from the beginning. It was always relying on Avisynth 3.

You've made your point. Why don't you let it go?

[RadicalEd]

This suggests to any sane reader your project has what it needs from the engine. Or maybe you exaggerate?
At the time it appeared that AviSynth 3 was going to materialize, as Caro and Bidoche were still active on it, so, yes, I considered the engine to be a sure thing. I couldn't have foreseen that Bidoche would get the melancholy, nobody could. It's unfortunate, but that's how things panned out. What can you do. Anyway, this is a silly argument and we ought to drop it as neuron2 suggests.

[RadicalEd]

Small update inspired by some unrelated code I had been working on: X•'s UI is now threaded, meaning it no longer locks up during encode. This opens up the possibility of canceling/pausing encodes, adding to the queue while an encode is running, and editing the settings of queued encodes, which is pretty cool and something I've wanted to implement for awhile now.

A few other things about the next release: It should have a full progress table that shows all jobs rather than just the current encode, and the code will be much, much cleaner, abstracting away the x264 functions from the interface such that swapping the libraries for the binaries in a future version will be trivial. I may put off the code reworking until beta++ just due to the amount of work, but it will be in there soon.

[Edit]Pause implemented, cancel et al probably when I stop being asleep.

[vzmr82]

I was looking after this project since it was first announced. I downloaded several of the beta versions, but I didn't do anything useful with it. Some of the encodings never finished...

And just looking at the blog, and the news update about the project, I too was assuming it was dead... it seams not, lets see. I hope it doesn't deserve the same kind of daily updates as http://builds.command-q.org/...

[RadicalEd]

I hope it doesn't deserve the same kind of daily updates as http://builds.command-q.org/...

Haha, yeah, the thing with builds is that I never worked out all the kinks in the script, so I never got to add it to cron, plus I wasn't sure anyone was actually using it. I have some ideas to bring it back to life including Sparkle integration and universal binaries, so it won't stay dead forever.

So many projects, so little time. Good thing it's almost Summer break.

[RadicalEd]

For those of you left wanting in the recent dry-spell of news at Command-Q, I've just made a post on the blog that will catch your attention. It contains the roadmap for app development for the rest of the year and offers some insight into how much is really going on behind the scenes, and how busy we've* really been. It also debuts some previously-unmentioned features of X•'s coming 1.0 release. The most relevant part to you guys would be:
The next thing on the list is something terribly overdue, and that is the final release version of X•. But your wait has not been in vain. Some of the features of X• 1.0 include live capture and editing, YouTube upload, DVD input, filtering support, true job control with pause/resume/cancel and a full job list, and many other improvements here and there including massive speed improvements. The other big change is that in order to facilitate cleaner code and easy swapping of encoding backends (for when X• eventually migrates from binary encoding to library encoding), X•’s encoding engine is being abstracted out into a versatile and backend-independent framework which will handle all of the encoder controls, called EnCore. This will be functionally similar to – but not excluding – libhandbrake, as libhandbrake could very easily be implemented as yet another encoding backend in EnCore. Moving the encode handling out of the main X• code tree will allow us to develop the interface agnostic of the actual encoding method used. But wait: EnCore is not just for H.264 - we’ll be introducing X•’s brand new cousin, !DVD, shortly after X•’s release.
So sorry again for the lack of updates, just know that the project is far from dead, and in fact becoming better by the day.

Full post here (http://blog.command-q.org/?p=238)

Edit: Oh, and for the skeptics: I'm not blowing smoke with this feature list. All of the mentioned enhancements for 1.0 are implemented at various levels of completion, and those that aren't already fully implemented are mostly just some busywork away from being finished. Later in the post I mention a demo video coming up; I just want to implement the job table view before making this. Most of those features will be present in the demo.

Edit 2:*And I do mean "we" this time (see: earlier in this thread). Command-Q has expanded since December. We have a few new developers working with us and a growing group of people working together on a top-secret project that is briefly mentioned in the blog post.

[Ankle Bond]

status update from http://command-q.org . bold added for emphasis.

Early this morning (5/17/09), command-q.org was hacked. While the attack was a relatively white-hat attempt to expose the insecurities of the previous pub.command-q.org system, and no specific data was lost, multiple user accounts on the forum and so on were also compromised. For everyone's own good, the .org is going to be down for a bit while we sort all this out and discover what data was and was not compromised. To the affected users, you'll be hearing from us shortly. Hopefully the site will be back soon, but I really just don't even know right now. This whole thing was pretty ***** lame.

Update (8:07 AM): The good news is that unless the whitehat in question is lying (and I don't believe he is), no user accounts were compromised except for my own throwaway site passwords. This means there shouldn't be any concern about stolen passwords from any of the site databases (apparently these are all properly hashed and salted anyway, thumbs up for safe software). Apparently the only one with anything to worry about is me. So don't sweat it too much.

Still determining how to respond to this whole situation, updates will be posted to this page.

Update (10:37 AM): Things are pretty much back to normal. The parts of the site that are database driven (blog, chan, forums that nobody uses) will be offline for a bit, but it's not a big deal.

Should clarify slightly, what occurred was not technically a hack or really even an exploit, it was simply an abuse of privileges given to pub users; namely the ability to upload and execute PHP files. This is mostly a failing of my host and it exemplifies a problem that has existed since pub's inception: the very weak controls offered over other FTP users in the system. With the recent site overhaul I had planned to address this, but I suppose I was a bit too slow. That said, all that occurred was that one ambitious pub user decided to abuse his PHP execution rights in order to gain access to the main site directory, snooping a few relatively useless database passwords and inserting a worthless comment into the old index.html. That's nice of him to not try to wreck havoc, but nothing dangerous really could have been done even if he had gone on a table-dropping and file-rm'ing spree. So yeah, that's what happened.

Update (12:15 PM): Site's going to be down in a big way for at least the next 24 hours or so.

5/19: Due to multiple extenuating circumstances, including, but not limited to, the above, command-q.org and all projects therein are suspended indefinitely.
- Michael

[MaXiMuS]

command-q.org and all projects therein are suspended indefinitely.

that is upseting ... damn ... :mad: :scared: :(

[Ajax_Undone]

@RadicalEd

So ed does this mean that your project is dead as well. Being as it is hosted at said website with said issues...

[MaXiMuS]

http://command-q.org/

is UP :)

with text "Don`t quit us just yet..."

[Ajax_Undone]

Yeah but it still seems ominous.

Besides no word from Ed on this new development here in the forums...

[RadicalEd]

'Oi all.

Noticed referrers coming from this thread in my access logs on the site. Since my email notifications on Doom9 have been broken for over a year, I tend to just check in occasionally, and normally this thread is dead when I do. So my apologies for not staying present. If some admin cares to look into the problem, I'd really appreciate it.

Now, as for what is going on with the site...

It's a pretty complicated situation, as you might've gleaned from the previous placeholder text. At the time when the site got 'sploited, multiple Bad Things™ were happening in the general vicinity of my Internets and I decided it would be best to pull the plug for awhile. Admittedly, the text "suspended indefinitely" is slightly melodramatic, because I didn't mean to imply "shut down forever", but rather "not going to be worked on until things get straightened out with the site and otherwise".

The current placeholder image, markedly less dramatic and depressing than the prior placeholder text (Macbot you are such a cute firework :3), is something I've been wanting to do for a few days now. It will likely stay while the site undergoes reconstruction. If anyone had accessed the front page of the site in the weeks prior to the exploit, they will have noticed that multiple areas of the site were going down for renovations. I'll probably leave the site the way it is while I rebuild each aspect.

I imagine the blog will be back up relatively soon, and I can go into greater depth about the situation there. Though for now this is really all there is to know. The reason there hasn't really been any news on the project front is merely that I've been involved in some freelance projects unrelated to command-q and those have been consuming most of my time (mainly because I'm getting paid for them :p ), and also because I have been taking a step back and learning the ins and outs of Cocoa and Objective-C development much more thoroughly (iTunes U++). So really, the next steps for the projects that you guys would be interested in mostly consist of rewriting and refining, which isn't so interesting on the face of things. Everything that was said in the roadmap blog post still pretty much holds true, however.

To make a long story short, the .org is not dead. The projects are quite healthy (four of the seven things in the placeholder image exist in working form, O naysayers). News will continue to come in. What's been happening the past two weeks has just been a necessary break in order to regroup. My apologies for it.

Thanks, guys, for being understanding. Moreso than certain (http://handbrake.fr/irclogs/handbrake/handbrake20090520_pg7.html) unnamed others (http://handbrake.fr/irclogs/handbrake/handbrake20090426_pg2.html). After reading things like that, I wasn't sure anyone really cared if command-q vanished from the face of the Earth. Good to know that's not true. I'll be in the IRC (irc://irc.efnet.net/#doom9) and refreshing the thread occasionally if you guys have any questions.

[RadicalEd]

Oh, I nearly forgot! I spoke to some GStreamer developers recently, who had some very exciting news! It turns out that GStreamer is working on an AviSynth plugin, and a means to parse AviSynth script! So while AviSynth 3 has stagnated, leaving us *nix users out in the cold, we will be getting a means to use AviSynth natively. This means very good things for a certain other project. The other good news about that is that the PiTiVi developers, who do most of the work on GNonLin, will be assisting with said project as well.

[RadicalEd]

Well, I suppose this is what I get for inquiring about maliciously-intended visits to my domain noticed earlier in my site's access logs. The Handbrake developers (dynaflash, jbrjake, and KonaB1end) have sunk to [link removed -- rule 4] stalking me on social networking sites and [link removed -- rule 4] threatening my life over relay chat. I'm going to have to avoid posting publicly for awhile until they get their heads on straight.

Hard to believe this was all caused by [link removed -- rule 4] a tagline on a website that vaguely implied that Handbrake wasn't the best GUI out there for encoding H.264 months ago.

I wish I could provide you guys with some contact info to keep in touch, but I'm afraid that would just lead to more harassment and threats.

[Guest]

Since the OP has now gone way OT on his own thread, and is posting links to rule 4 violations, not to mention the fact that it has all become vaporware, it's time to close it.