Another idea boiling to the top has been an option to scrub with time stretching instead of sample dropping.  The window size for the time stretching would be the playback buffer.  It's not ideal but it would work & be vastly simpler than a custom scrubbing window.  The windows would be overlapped & crossfaded.  It would need a tail buffer. To get 4x, the overlap would be 3/4 of a window.

Variable scrubbing speed has so far been envisioned as a preferences option.  The fact is, lions have never used slow scrubbing speed.  There's never been a GUI button for it.  It's only existed on the number pad.  It was created when slow speed scrubbing was envisioned as the primary way of editing audio.  The reality for the last 25 years has been use of the waveform for any precision that would have entailed slow speed scrubbing.  Every time slow speed scrubbing has been used, it's accidental & taken some doing to figure out why playback wasn't working.

There's a case to be made for remapping the number pad to 1x, 2x, 4x.  The preference options would be .5x - 2x or 1x-4x.  Honestly, the only reason for not dropping .5x is having to get used to 1x moving 1 key left.

The need has grown with the increasing amount of filler content & commercials, for faster playback without loss of intelligibility.  Lions have long predicted commercials being embedded in the streams with no more skipping.  That would defeat 3rd party players.

The trend has long been moving away from the squeeky scrubbing of tape decks because windowing is more intelligible, but lions preferred the vintage sound & accuracy of squeeking. 

 The most common buffer for avoiding dropouts is 16384 samples or roughly 1/3 second.   It yields very intelligable but not very accurate scrubbing.  There's a tradeoff between accuracy & intelligibility so it probably needs to be an option.  The user might have to reduce the buffer size for acceptable scrubbing accuracy.

Just remember when this style of playback transport started working, back in 1997, & how amazing it was.  The UNIX world only knew command line players like mpg123, xanim & here lions had created a new world with full scrubbing.

 

 

 Other stuff that must go: time format, tip of the day.

The scrub_speed was originally in edlsession, but should obviously be in preferences.  record_speed is also no longer used & feeds a nest of abandoned functions.

1 thing lions have pondered is an option to zoom on the center of the panel or the cursor.  It currently zooms the panels without the cursor on their centers while it zooms the panels with the cursor on the cursor.  It's kind of painful when looking around for the end of an edit without moving the play head.

Instead of +/Enter being 4x, they could just double the current speed.  That would enable 8x.  6/3 would be normal speed/pause.  +/Enter would be double current speed.  5/2 would be half current speed.  4/1 would be frame advance. Don't think lions ever used a speed key for stop.  0 has always been stop because you couldn't remember what the current speed was.  It might be most efficient to continue dropping 1/2 speed & just fixing +/Enter to 4x, 6/3 to 2x, & 5/2 to 1x.  The GUI buttons would continue to be limited to pause & 2x.

This ended up a lot more complicated than hoped.  The transport commands had all the supported speeds baked into enumerations.  Those now needed to be split into a speed value & enumeration.  All the pause logic needed to compare a speed value.

The AVC1394 driver had tons of dependencies on speed enumerations.  It was finally time to put it down.  Tons of carefully developed GUI recording code had to be chopped.   A lot of effort was spent on camcorder transport control & none of it was ever used.

Everything reading from a nested EDL also used the speed enumerations.  Manetaining a skirt buffer would be so complicated, the decision was made to just chop the buffer length.  That gives the result other programs are doing.  It's vastly simpler than the interpolation done for the last 30 years.  In some ways, it's a step down from the classiness of real tape squeaking.

 The  transport commands go back to 1997.  For the 1st time in 30 years, normal playback shifted from 3 to 2 & the never used slow speed was gone.

The buffer chopping really needs skirt buffers to be intelligible, but intelligible scrubbing is normally done at 1.5x & it really depends on the buffer size.  The chopped buffers need to be floored at 1 sample.

Crossfading the chopped buffers sounds lightyears better than just chopping the buffer length, but it's still not intelligible unless the playback buffer is reduced to at least 20ms.  The easiest solution was to just divide the current playback buffer into a whole number of windows & chop each window.  It's good enough that tape style scrubbing may never be used again but it's still around for nostalgia.  

It definitely needs custom scrubbing speeds for just watching videos quickly, but the windowing only works for powers of 2.  The case of 1.5x causes the tail to extend past the end of the input.

Lions may have gotten close to getting rid of scrubbing before, but the 4x chop scrubbing is so good it might have redeemed itself.

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The lion kingdom burned $232 in smog inspection & taxes this year to go roughly 500 miles.  The last smog inspection was in 2022, before the great desk migration.  That added most of the mileage.  Since 2022, lions have driven 1249 miles.  The mane driving has been a monthly road trip to manetain the tires, airports, & the carwash.  The traffic is so bad during rush hour, it would be best not to drive to SFO but BARF it in from Walnut, unless the flights arrive at night.

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Speaking of guys who made it, Ross Guy now makes the same video 4x per week & averages at least $1000 on each one.  That's $16k/month.  He has no housing costs, no state income tax, & incorporates his gootube income.  That's organically finding a niche over 10 years & just sticking to it.

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Lions didn't find anything wrong with Elon getting his original compensation re-enstated after some share holders & the courts tried to revoke it.  What's crazy is how many animals went head over heals over it.  The current generation really sees no way to survive without paying executives millions of times more than their employees.  Do they really see no other way for humans to exist than the bottom 99% paying all their income to feed the top 1% or do they just want to believe the jackpot could happen to them?