In the last two updates it is said that one should revert back to Xuggle 3.4. I did not, and kept Xuggle 5.4 and everything works perfectly fine as it always did.
Can someone please list all the known issues/bugs with 5.4 and which trouble they supposedly cause in Tracker?
I'm asking because it always feels strange to revert to a very old version (I mean, new versions are released because they fix bugs).
Will you in the future go "back" (forth) to a newer Xuggle again? I also read in the Xuggle Blog that the author stopped working on it a year ago. Will Tracker use another video framwork in the future?
"Foo Bar" asked: can someone please list all the known issues/bugs with 5.4 and which trouble they supposedly cause in Tracker?
It's a good question. I had high hopes when Xuggle 5.4 became available and certainly didn't expect it to introduce new bugs. But it did and after trying unsuccessfully for 6 months to get them resolved, I finally decided to revert to 3.4.
Here are the known bugs with version 5.4:
when playing some mov and mp4 files (eg, BallTossOut.mov, one of the Tracker videos), the displayed image lags the actual frame number by 4 frames--ie, what is displayed is the image from the frame played 4 steps earlier. If you step forward several steps, then step back, the video image continues to move forward! Not all mov files are affected, so the issue is likely in the codec handling. The H264 codec is particularly suspect.
it fails to export mov and mp4 files, and only succeeds with wmv and flv--neither of which is playable with QuickTime. That means Xuggle 5.4 users can't share exported videos or Tracker ZIPS with QuickTime users unless they use a JPEG, PNG or animated GIF format.
Unfortunately, as you know the principle developer of Xuggle has stopped all work on it, including bug fixes, because of time constraints due to a new job. Fortunately, nearly all of the changes from version 3.4 to 5.4 were related to streaming, not files.
I am pleased to hear that you are experiencing no problems with Xuggle version 5.4. I do monitor the Xuggle users group and if fixes to the above issues are found and posted I may again move to a new version. I am also keeping an eye out for other suitable open source video frameworks, but there is nothing compelling at this time.
Thanks for clarifying this. On our site we are working mostly with uncompressed videos, this seems to be the reason then why Xuggle works fine for us.
We trade disk/RAM space for time, because we need to analyze the videos directly after capture anyways - so waiting 20 minutes on the compression doesn't make much sense for us when the additional load/transfer times due to bigger size are just some more seconds. ;)
