We found time to talk with François Revol this past weekend, and he granted us some time out of his busy schedule for a small interview.

(Editor note: The Pi movie screen capture image to the right is NOT François Revol... )


Thanks for allowing The BeOSJournal some time to speak with you. We know you're a very busy coder these days, working on nPlay and helping with openBeOS.

Revol: My Pleasure :)

How long have you worked on nPlay?

Revol: I began coding in BeOS in July of 2001 I think... after having erased my Linux partition :) nPlay was started at the end of August. I began playing with Vnc... and BeVnc came out.
It's a really quick port of the windows Vnc server..; but I used it already for 3 hours long without crashing, so... :)

I wanted to access my comp from school. The networking practical work was quite boring... so tunelling Vnc over several things was much more interesting.

Was that your first taste of BeOS programming, in July?

Revol: Since the WinVnc server was in C++ it gave me a taste on this, coz even if I knew the concepts I never really programmed in C++ (I used C and asm before) even if MFC is not as nice as the BeOS API...

How many years of programming experience did you have before starting on nPlay?

Revol: Hmm, need to count :-( Around 12 years since I began playing with Basic on my ORIC Atmos :) Then I learned asm (some 8 bit, and 68k) and C because I wanted to do a program for windows 3.

Nice. What was the motivating factor behind nPlay's creation? Did you have some sort of personal itch to scratch, or were you just bored and wanted to code a rather difficult app to pass the time? ;-)

Revol: Well I was used to the comfort of windows about divx...I wanted to play DiVX in BeOS too but the default divx codecs weren't able to use my overlay :-(

Can you illustrate it's current feature set?

Revol: Well, currently it is bound to the straight BeOS media kit, with some bugs it can work around (like seeking, but the trick is ugly). The last version has some keyboard shortcuts (the left-right arrows seeks in the file, f for fullscreen, t for topmost).
It can also change the video renderer on the fly (even though some codecs doesn't like it...) so you can switch from overlay to drawbitmap to make a screenshot, then switch back to view the film.
It can also be controlled like MediaPlayer with hey commands from the Terminal.

If you were to create a roadmap of nPlay's future, what sort of features would you see down the road?

Revol: Well, I don't want to make too many promises.

of course, but.. what are some of the future wishes...

Revol: I would like to separate the playing part from the rest, that is make a 'NMediaKit' that would handle all the file things, have many plugins (thinking about ffmpeg codecs, streaming ...)
I'll try to make GUI plugins too with a "native" gui, and a skinable one maybe. The player would be just a shell that would do the communication between the gui and the media part. That would make it easier to make Opera/zilla plugins I think. Not sure about it. It's an option.

Any other options/features that you would be willing to reveal? ;)

Revol: hmmm I already looked at the Linux realplayer codecs... wondering how hard it would be to make plugins for the NMediaKit :)
My final goal would be to have a universal player, something even Windows doesn't have (Real, WMP, QT...)
The problem of course still being all those proprietary codecs like Sorenson, WMA... That stinks.

We hear you are active with the openBeOS project. How is that going?

Revol: Well, I am in the kernel team, even though I only wrote a pref app until now, because I didn't have the time to dig into the kernel. That should be corrected but I'm glad they made huge progress even without me :)))

You mentioned theming and skinning earlier. Would you be willing to accept submissions for a radically different UI for nPlay, from our readers?

Revol: sure, if the gui stuff is implemented as plugins, it will be quite easy.
nPlay is open-source and I don't intend to change that.

How soon would nPlay have the ability to sport custom skins?

Revol: As soon as I have the API defined :)
I'm still in the design phase now, because I don't want to have to rewrite every version... I learned UML this year... trying to apply some of that with my programming.

Would you mind if other coders contacted you to help with the API?

Revol: I already had some help from other coders, for bug fixes, and I have some new GUI stuff already, thanks to shatty (BeShare member), that just awaits the rest of the code :) That is what open-source is about anyway.

Can you provide us any idea on how optimized nPlay is for BeOS?

Revol: hmm, I'd say not at all :) I didn't really try to squeze every little nanosec and the synchro algorithm (if we can call it), is more of guess and try than logic. That is soemthing I want to change.

Excellent. Thank you for your time out today from your busy schedule. We certainly appreciate the insight.

Revol: My Pleasure. :)

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If you have questions or comments about nPlay, and want to reach François Revol, you can usually find him on BeShare as mmu_man, or feel free to and mail him at: revol@free.fr

Download Nifty Player (nPlay) from its BeBits page.