Status update on VC/DC (VideoCD player for Dreamcast)

OneThirty8 posted some interesting news regarding the status of his VC/DC project at DCEmulation.org:

Just another status update. Nothing to release yet. I still have a lot of stuff that I want to implement, but I will probably make a WIP release sometime soonish (if not in August, then probably September).

Here's what is wrong that I know of:

• I'm thinking that I need to rethink my sound output code again. Although I do feel it works better than the 0.1a release, and is much better than the horrible 0.1 sound output module (seriously, what was I thinking back then?), it will occasionally stutter. I think it's a simple matter of not asking the sound hardware if it wants more sample data often enough, but I'm trying to figure out a decent solution.
• The GUI is still not quite good enough.
• Audio/video synch should be pretty good on VCD-quality films. The only issue that I'm really aware of there is that when the aforementioned audio hiccups occur, the sample data that has been decoded gets pushed back a bit due to the short period of repeated audio. It will pretty quickly drift back into synch.

Here is what will be new (that I can remember and find worth mentioning):

• I stole a couple of functions from an old version of xine I happened to have in my home directory to handle resampling of audio when it drifts out of sync. It seems to do a pretty adequate job.
• To go along with that, I have some pretty ugly-looking but almost-adequate a/v sync code. It still needs some work and could probably be done much more efficiently, but it's doing a pretty good job.
• I believe that I mentioned that I was trying to add support for playback control (ie, menus and all that good stuff). There is some stuff I haven't tested (audio-only items, continuation segment play items, stuff like that) but most of that stuff should work well. I've figured a pretty adequate means of entering any of the remote control buttons that were described in the VCDImager source code, including numeric entries.
• I believe I also mentioned that I didn't think I could get extended playback control to work. The difference between that and regular playback control would be hot-spots in the menu items. I was wrong--that's working too.
• In order to get at the extended versions of the play sequence descriptor files, I had to be able to read the ISO-9660 filesystem in the first track of the CD, which I couldn't do with the standard ISO-9660 implementation in KOS. After a little head-scratching, I figured out how to make a modified version of this filesystem driver that will work with VCD (and only VCD, really). You should be able to browse your VCD and play the *.dat files, but I've screwed something up so these files end early. If I can figure out where the mistake is I will certainly fix it, but otherwise you'll want to be aware of this and just play your VCD as a VCD.
• For good measure, I also created another modified version of fs_iso9660.c to allow you to play bin/cue VCD images. I didn't really want to bother parsing the cue sheet and figured an alternative means of finding track start points based on other information stored in a pre-defined location on the VCD, so the cue file isn't even needed.
• There's an ugly settings menu. You can turn off PBC so your VCD will play in order from first chapter to last chapter and skip over any still images (pretty much the way VC/DC 0.1a plays a VCD), try downsampling the audio to see if some movie files will play back a bit better (they probably won't, but that's why that option is there)... stuff like that. There's not much in there, really.
• I took Bero's sh4 version of the dct64 for mpglib from DCMovie Player. It works well.
• I updated libmpeg2 to version 0.5.1, although I didn't bother updating libvo since the code I use (the DC video driver) obviously only changes when I change my code.
• There's a theme template for DCDivX floating around somewhere. I used this basic design for the upcoming VC/DC GUI. The buttons aren't all the same as for DCDivX (playback buttons had to be mapped differently--fast-forward is now triggered with the analog stick, for example, so that the D-Pad can be used for navigation by chapter) but the menu buttons should be fairly similar.

I forget what else. It's been the last several weeks that I've been really working on this a lot, but I've been tinkering on and off since last year's release.

Source: DCEmulation.org