(2018-09-02, 19:44)cable_cutter Wrote: What are everyone's long term plans?
I'm really liking the video quality with MadVR + Kodi. But if this fork is truly abandoned, then it will start getting more and more outdated over time. It's already feeling a little chunky for me: few seconds of black screen when starting up or stopping a movie, no netflix / amazon support, random crashes or needs to be restarted to fix a glitch with audio / whatnot.
Is there any alternative out there? Anything on the horizon that you're considering jumping to?
This fork has definitely been abandoned, but that doesn't mean updates are impossible or won't ever come in the future. It is hard to find a replacement who is passionate about a closed-source project like madVR managed by one person, madshi, and an open-source project commissioned by a team of Team Kodi volunteers. They would be a rare breed of programmer.
aracnoz never logs into his account, unless he is here to provide a new build. Now that there is a Beta of v18 available, there could be some small hope of a merge in the near future before a final version of v18 is available, but that is unlikely and would probably require a lot of work to manage the thousands of past commits and a new 64-bit Windows build. We can only hope aracnoz is still out there and healthy because he would likely be aware that his active download links have been hit hundreds or thousands of times by new and past DSPlayer users, and he has provided final builds in the past for a couple of years now. Even then, when v18 is available, someone, possibly me, may attempt to merge the existing DSPlayer codebase into v18. This would take a lot of time and the code may not work any longer due to major changes to Kodi since the last version.
I'm not sure why DSPlayer would become any more clunky, besides any issues brought by the Windows 1803 update. Black screens can be caused by fullscreen exclusive mode, which doesn't work well with Windows 10. This has to be addressed by some type of alternative in madVR. DSPlayer doesn't depend on the Kodi video engine, so it shouldn't be any less stable than it used to be. You can replace the audio renderer, subtitle filter and update LAV Filters to have the latest components. Random crashes of Kodi are supposed to be addressed in v18 by making Kodi more stable. A potential issue on the horizon with madVR is that it is going to become a native D3D11 app. There is a checkbox in DSPlayer for D3D11 presentation that overrides the madVR control panel, and these checkboxes could break madVR support in the future. I hope those few DSPlayer settings are removed for that reason, if aracnoz provides a build for v18.
As for alternatives, MediaPortal 1 is an excellent media front-end with plenty of customization, add-on support and madVR integration. It is not Kodi, though. JRiver Media Center is probably the best media player on Windows for being able to play everything, even with menus, in high quality, but its media front-end is nowhere near as robust and customizable as Kodi or MediaPortal. If DSPlayer ever became non-functional, I would go back to core Kodi builds and use either MPC-BE, MPC-HC or PotPlayer as my media player. You would lose resume functionality from Kodi and the integrated OSD, but I am watching videos most of the time, not the OSD. I still do constant testing with MPC-BE because it is a better media player.
