Diego's Rants » MediaInfo Mac

The digital certificate breakage

Diego Massanti — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:42:29 +0000

So um… some weeks ago I released a new version of MediaInfo Mac with several fixes on my own code, with also a newer build of the MediaInfo Lib by Jerome Martinez, and, finally, a newer version of Sparkle (the amazing framework that i use for the automated software updates).
To make a really long story very short, Sparkle changed an important behavior: Now each and every update that I release has to be signed with a digital certificate, which is nothing but good, because it gives an extra layer of security for the final users.
Bad news are that I totally missed that part in Sparkle’s release docs, so I released an update without the certificate, and from there on, users were stuck on that version without the possibility to update.
I still had the ability to show to the users a nice dialog informing them about my error and kindly asking to update manually, but even that, i still can see that a LOT of people is still using the broken version (0.7.7.58), which leads me to the following conclusion:
Most people will NOT upgrade their software unless the process is totally automatic and painless, not even users of MediaInfo which are usually over the “Average Joe”.

This can be seen on the usage statistics that i keep (which I did reset some hours ago btw, due to some preparations for the upcoming MediaInspector beta) where you can see that there are still a LOT of users stuck on 0.7.7.58.
So to sum things up:

If you are using Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, the latest version that you can use is 0.7.17.3, get it here.
If you are on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” or newer, just get the latest version here.

Cheers!.

Diego.

New projects, the future of MediaInfo Mac and some other rants.

Diego Massanti — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:27:18 +0000

As you maybe noticed, i have announced some days ago about the discontinuation of MediaInfo Mac. The reasons behind this are a lot, being the most promiment one that the codebase is really dirty due to the fact that I was totally new to the Mac platform when i started writing the application, and due to a lot of “workarounds” that I have to do in order to keep compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4 aka “Tiger”.

MediaInfo Mac has been a really succesful app in terms of user adoption, at least based on those users who accept to send anonymous statistical data to my server (which are the minority), i can tell that there are around 50.000 users.

In any case, MediaInfo Mac is being rewritten from scratch under a different name, and I will be publishing a public beta really soon (click here for an early screenshot). The main differences when compared to the actual version are the possibility to compare and load several media files at the same time, possibility to print / share movie file reports, including stills every X seconds, complete archival grade report generation for the most popular high end formats and the possibility to automatically format and upload movie reports to the most popular pastebin services (I had a lot of request for this last feature).

There are going to be 2 versions of the new MediaInfo iteration: a freeware one which will have exactly the same features that MediaInfo Mac actually have, plus multiple file load and comparison and the new UI.
In parallel, I will be releasing a commercial version of MediaInfo Mac for that people or companies interested in the enhanced reporting and archival sheet capabilities (usually TV channels, video production studios, etc).

If you are interested in beta-testing the new MediaInfo Mac, feel free to leave a comment here or contact me directly at: diego (at sign here) massanti.com.

So in other words, MediaInfo Mac, is not dead, it is just changing shapes.

MediaInfo Mac is now Discontinued.

Diego Massanti — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:08:08 +0000

Hi there, just a quick note to let you all know that MediaInfo Mac is now officially discontinued.

You can get the latest MediaInfo Mac release by visiting the releases archive but no new versions or bugfixes will be released.

Thanks to the more than 50k people who downloaded, contributed and used MediaInfo Mac.

MediaInfo Mac 0.7.7.58, revisited.

Diego Massanti — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:45:29 +0000

As you maybe know, time is a commodity these days, but i took some hours to fix some bugs and update several things in MediaInfo Mac.
Most of the fixes are related to the usability aspect of this little tool, as in, improved open and save dialogs, etc, but there is also some speed improvement in the parsing routines, and, the application is 64bit ready now (for capable hardware).
For the late comers, MediaInfo Mac is a Macintosh version of an amazing tool (called MediaInfo) created by Jerome Martinez, you can find more info about his incredible work by going here.

If you want to download MediaInfo Mac, you can visit the official site by going here… or, if you are lazy, you can just grab the latest version by clicking here.

Below is a little video demo of what the application can do and what kind of detailed information you should expect when processing video / audio files.

As usual, questions, comments and suggestions are welcome

MediaInfo Mac 0.7.6.30 update released

Diego Massanti — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:04:49 +0000

Hi there, just a quick note to let you know that a new version of MediaInfo Mac (0.7.6.30) has been released, not only it includes several bugfixes and improvements in the Cocoa arena, but also a new build of the MediaInfo engine which features the following improvements:

AVC: Count of reference frames.
AU: Comments.
Some global speed improvement.
Id3v2: Unsynchronized frames support (v2.3 & v2.4).
MKV: handling of files created for streaming.
MPEG-4: Handling of corrupted stream size info with some PCM streams.
DVD video: Hebrew patch (“iw” code is mapped to Hebrew).
MPEG-4: better handling of bitrate mode (VBR or CBR).
AVI: MediaInfo reads now the framerate value from the container rather than the stream value.
AC3: TrueHD detection.
MPEG-TS (or Bluray): VC-1, AC3+ and AC3 TrueHD detection.
AVC in MKV: all SEI userdata infos from x264/eavc in Writing library settings.
EVO: Better detection of duration.
Dirac: raw files parsing.
MPEG-TS: Dirac management.
MPEG-TS: DVB subtitles/Teletext management.
MPEG-4 Visual (DivX/XviD): writing library name was missing.
MPEG-Video: some DTS files with wrong extension were detected as MPEG-Video.
SWF: Compressed SWF files support is back.

If you are an actual user, just launch the application and use the auto update feature, or you can get the latest version by visiting the official MediaInfo Mac website.

As usual, feel free to leave any comment or suggestion in here.

Enjoy

MediaInfo for Mac: Know everything about your media files.

Diego Massanti — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:18:20 +0000

You should consider this piece of software my “hello world” project in the Mac development arena, because, even the fact that i have pretty good skills when it comes to OO development, I’m totally new when it comes to the Mac, and I’m using this project mainly as a learning experience.

Attention: download links were moved

In order to keep things organized, the download links and general information for MediaInfo Mac were moved into this new website.

In the past few days i have been working in a full Aqua version of a linux tool called “Mediainfo”, so this is the result.
Let me introduce you to “MediaInfo Mac”.

MediaInfo Mac does just one thing: it gives you a lot of information about multimedia files, even files that QuickTime can’t read, and it does that by using a custom Universal Binary build of the linux library “libmediainfo” by Jerome Martinez as its core.
This application is obviously OpenSource and i will make all the sources available as soon as i finish cleaning the code and configuring an SVN repository on this server.
MediaInfo Mac requires any PowerPC or Intel Macintosh computer running MacOS X 10.4 “Tiger” or newer.
If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to leave your comment below .

A BIG thank you goes to Rainer Brockerhoff, (who is a true monster in the Macintosh development area), for having the patience to answer a lot of my questions, and also, to the guys at #macdev on freenode for helping me to understand a lot of things in the “Cocoa Arena”. Thank you, i really appreciate your time.

In order to keep things in organized, anything in relation with MediaInfo Mac is going to be on this new website.

IF you are any kind of software tracker, there is a feed with MediaInfo updates, and it is compatible with the AppCast definition.