AquaCenter - A brand new media center for PowerPC Mac (AirPlay, Live TV, Plex, Twitch, SoundCloud and more!)

[srp]

This is AquaCenter, the evolution of an app I made last month called AquaPlex.

AquaCenter is a general purpose media player that also allows you to interact with many different web services that are currently too slow or unable to load through a web browser.

It features rich, user-friendly features in a Kodi-like "integration" system for many different services, including:

• AirPlay Receiver: Use your Mac as an AirPlay speaker and interface with services like Spotify, Tidal, YouTube Music, Pandora. No additional setup or extra device needed. Uses shairport-sync: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync - does not work on Snow Leopard
• Live TV: Stream thousands of free TV channels with Plex TV, Tubi and Samsung TV integrations, with custom m3u playlist support - no login needed
• Plex: Direct play and transcode your Plex library with detailed show and movie listings
• YouTube: Play videos by URL and see recently played videos
• Twitch: Play streams by URL or streamer name at preferred quality and framerate settings
• SoundCloud: Select pre-made playlists, curate your own, search for and listen to music
• Media Player: Mixed media player, plays over 200 types of media including DVDs
• Internet Radio: View, play and favorite Icecast streams directly
• Weather Center: Enter your ZIP code and get a visual weather breakdown
• Game Streaming: Low-latency streaming from your PC to your Mac with Moonlight game streaming; includes native USB/Bluetooth controller support (experimental)

Some other features include:

• Universal search system - search local and web sources for the content you want
• 60 FPS stream support (hardware dependent)
• Kickass music visualizer (WIP)
• Multi-instance support (stream Spotify from AirPlay while watching Twitch, for example)
• Highly interactive - use media keys, Apple Remote or even USB/Bluetooth game controllers to browse and control playback
• Watch history - quickly resume watching where you left off

All of these features are powered by standard libraries like ffmpeg and yt-dlp, with AltiVec + GPU-based convert and upload loops, speedy OpenGL rendering, and smart frame pacing that works well on PowerPC (G4 and G5) hardware. AquaCenter is written in modern C++/ObjC++, using a native Cocoa interface.

The end result is a pretty serviceable media experience with good compatibility, rich integrations and many different use cases.

With AquaCenter, I can playback Twitch streams at 1080p 60FPS on my G5 Quad, and 360p 30FPS on my 1GHz iBook G4 (1GB RAM), with good compatibility and performance.

Below you can download an alpha build, 0.3.0. G4 and G5 optimized builds are available, pick the one needed for your platform. The install size is about 500MB. It is highly recommended to have at least 1GB of RAM available.

Releases are available on my GitHub: https://github.com/doctashay/aquacenter-releases
Direct download from GitHub (~180MB compressed, ~500MB installed): G5 Alpha / G4 Alpha

Think of this release as a less-polished "proof-of-concept" to gather feedback and test performance on different hardware and software - particularly with searching, video and audio pace sync, and video stability. At the moment this platform is G5-preferred, testing is limited on G4s. Bug reports are welcome.

Requires OS X 10.5 or later. Unofficial Mac OS X releases like "Sorbet" Leopard have not been tested.

When onboarding, if you do not have a Plex token, SoundCloud client ID or Sunshine host to enter, you can just close the onboarding window and proceed normally. More documentation for this is coming soon.

Make sure to enable automatic update checking, so you can be notified when I push a new version!

 

[Appleuser201]

Wow this is incredible, can't wait to try on iBook G4 1.2ghz. Looking to get a high end eMac (1.25ghz+) as it's powerful speakers and great CRT display would make video content (especially older cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park) a real joy to watch.

I hope the youtuber Action Retro covers this project! He did a video on Powerfox recently.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Ive gotten further with this. I am able to update my plex token and it sees the walking dead that Ive been watching however I just get a black screen, no video or sound when I play it. Neat app!

 

[srp]

Ive gotten further with this. I am able to update my plex token and it sees the walking dead that Ive been watching however I just get a black screen, no video or sound when I play it. Neat app!

Glad you made some progress. Does the result change when you switch to Direct Play vs Transcoding?

Are you using the OpenGL hardware backend, or Core Image/software?

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

So, I actually got it to play for a few seconds and then it stopped and then my a1047 PMG5 gui became unresponsive/froze LOL, so I rebooted. After reboot I could not get it to play again and I made the age old mistake of not writing down what I had changed prior to the crash. I will play with it some more tomorrow when I get a moment. It was playing pretty darn nicely though while it was - aidio+video with next to no freezing really.

So yeah, good progress IMO. I will make sure to document starting tomorrow.

 

[srp]

So, I actually got it to play for a few seconds and then it stopped and then my a1047 PMG5 gui became unresponsive/froze LOL, so I rebooted. After reboot I could not get it to play again and I made the age old mistake of not writing down what I had changed prior to the crash. I will play with it some more tomorrow when I get a moment. It was playing pretty darn nicely though while it was - aidio+video with next to no freezing really.

So yeah, good progress IMO. I will make sure to document starting tomorrow.

Thanks for letting me know! Performance is sort of a mixed bag, hoping to have an update out to correct some issues soon. Crash reports would be super helpful too, cheers!

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Woohoo. I got it working on my a1047 dual cpu 2.0ghz 4gb ddr pmg5 with a few opportunities still noted below. CPU usage isn't bad either 🙂

My settings included PMG5 performance and I set scaling to crop.

One issue I am now experiencing is that once I play the episode, it wont forward to the next episode. It stays on a black or gray screen like this. I will get a few spinning symbols like its buffering but I never actually get to the next video.

Making great progress. This is so cool watching plex vids on a powermac G5🙂

I forgot to mention - When I make the change in settings to pmg5 performance, the gui doesnt give me a choice to save it. The save button remains grayed out. In order to save it, I must navigate to another tab, make a change, and then the save button becomes highlighted and I can save both setting changes. This is so cool though because I am playing stuff cleanly and smoothly that I typically stream on my m2 12c MBP16 or my i7-5820k 6c MX25 box. Once I get the plex video ironed out, I will play with all the other functionality this new app has. Very excited about the internet radio add on - get stuck into that.

🙂

 

[srp]

Awesome! Glad to hear it's been at least somewhat usable for you 🙂

I've nailed down the cause of some issues involving player stability (the black screen and white screen issues you run into), issues with fast forwarding or skipping to a new show, some issues with shairport-sync (AirPlay Speaker not working on some networks), audio sync, and a few other minor issues, so if anyone has been having issues in any of those departments, hopefully you'll see some improvements when I release the new version (no eta on that at the moment 😛)

Thanks for being such an awesome alpha tester for me 🙂

 

[srp]

Today I released a small update intended on addressing an issue with starting AirPlay sessions and broken UI state when switching from one video source to another. OP links have been updated.

Release AquaCenter 0.3.0 (alpha release) · doctashay/aquacenter-releases

This is a minor update for AquaCenter. It features bug fixes and minor improvements. Fixed an issue preventing some AirPlay sessions from starting Improved robustness of video switching and teardo...

github.com

 

[Sr.Freson]

Today I released a small update intended on addressing an issue with starting AirPlay sessions and broken UI state when switching from one video source to another. OP links have been updated.

Release AquaCenter 0.3.0 (alpha release) · doctashay/aquacenter-releases

This is a minor update for AquaCenter. It features bug fixes and minor improvements. Fixed an issue preventing some AirPlay sessions from starting Improved robustness of video switching and teardo...

github.com

I have just tried this with a 1.25ghz imac g4, mac os 10.5.8, just as an airplay spotify server but it only worked once, and with choppy audio.

After that, I couldn’t get my iphone connected any more.

What I have seen is that everytime I run your application, settings appear to be as default (g5 presets) and going into airplay function for the first time always results in going back to the main menu.

Thanks!

 

[srp]

I have just tried this with a 1.25ghz imac g4, mac os 10.5.8, just as an airplay spotify server but it only worked once, and with choppy audio.

After that, i couldn’t get my iphone connected any more.

What I have seen is that everytime i run you application, settings appear to be as default (g5 presets) and going into airplay function for the first time always results in going back to the main menu.

Thanks!

I have an iMac G4 so maybe it's time to dust it off and do some testing. Thanks for letting me know.

 

[Sr.Freson]

I have an iMac G4 so maybe it's time to dust it off and do some testing. Thanks for letting me know.

Thanks! Do you think it could be that a single core cpu,like the one from the imac g4, is not able to handle the audio stream?

 

[srp]

Thanks! Do you think it could be that a single core cpu,like the one from the imac g4, is not able to handle the audio stream?

An iMac G4 should be able to handle an audio stream, just needs optimization on my end.

 

[dannyherrmann]

@srp we appear to both be working on shairport-sync applications for PowerPC! very excited to see this aquacenter project happening as well, just came across it. I've built a Spotify + AirPlay application called TigerTunes for powerPC - some others are testing this for me and we are having separate discussion in thread below if you're interested...

macrumors-TigerTunes

TigerTunes focuses on a 'Bridge' architecture to keep the audio bit-perfect and the CPU usage ultra-low for background listening on lower spec PowerPC machines, aquacenter seems primarly focused on G5 powerPC.

anyways, cheers to keeping PowerPC alive!

 

[srp]

@srp we appear to both be working on shairport-sync applications for PowerPC! very excited to see this aquacenter project happening as well, just came across it. I've built a Spotify + AirPlay application called TigerTunes for powerPC - some others are testing this for me and we are having separate discussion in thread below if you're interested...

macrumors-TigerTunes

TigerTunes focuses on a 'Bridge' architecture to keep the audio bit-perfect and the CPU usage ultra-low for background listening on lower spec PowerPC machines, aquacenter seems primarly focused on G5 powerPC.

anyways, cheers to keeping PowerPC alive!

Sweet project! Glad someone is showing Tiger some love.

My approach is to do all of the playback on device. Shairport is super configurable and you can make the stream stupid cheap. My issue with G4s was that I left debug mode on when I was building the library (oops 😛) and needed to tweak the codec and sample rate.

For Spotify, are you using librespot? Without it I assume you can only use it as a Spotify connect client.

You should try and implement a bridge free mode!

 

[dannyherrmann]

Sweet project! Glad someone is showing Tiger some love.

My approach is to do all of the playback on device. Shairport is super configurable and you can make the stream stupid cheap. My issue with G4s was that I left debug mode on when I was building the library (oops 😛) and needed to tweak the codec and sample rate.

For Spotify, are you using librespot? Without it I assume you can only use it as a Spotify connect client.

You should try and implement a bridge free mode!

@srp haha I’ve definitely been in those trenches with shairport-sync. Now you’ve got me wondering if I remembered to strip the debug symbols for my TigerTunes build... I better go check that...lol

And yes, the Bridge uses go-librespot. I’m a big fan of the work Gianluca and the team are doing there. I was a follower of librespot-java and it’s been great to see the transition to the Go implementation, which is so actively maintained right now.

When I started this project a couple of years back, I was firmly in that 'No Bridge' mindset. I actually spent a long time attempting to backport librespot-python to Python 2.7 specifically for Tiger/Leopard lol see that attempt here --> (https://github.com/dannyherrmann/librespot-python-ppc), but between the modern crypto requirements and asyncio hurdles, it became clear that even a 'working' version would hammer a G4 CPU just to stay connected.

The Bridge Architecture was my 'Version 2.0' realization. Most people in the community have a modern laptop sitting right next to their vintage Mac. By letting the modern machine do the 'hard stuff' (TLS 1.3, AES, transcoding), the PowerPC can focus on being a high-end, silent Audiophile DAC. Plus, this approach supports lower-spec models like the G3 that would otherwise be left out.

Honestly, seeing how well the Bridge works on Tiger has me feeling confident about trying something similar for Mac OS 9 next! haha