A lot of MediaSource player fixes related to when changing the quality, seeking and re-play improvements in the Wayfarer 1.16 release for MorphOS. YouTube now opens faster and the speed improvements can be seen instantly.
Also. The playback for PowerPC CPUs without Altivec is now working again. There are also fixes regarding switching between playing multiple streams. 1.15 was released and then 1.16 shortly after fixed crashes and also disables the MorphOS screensaver while playing a video.
Nice news, but what about the improvements? I had to test out it myself and here is my experience.
Wayfarer improves a lot
I love to test Wayfarer on my weakest MorphOS machine. Today it is my iBook G4 1.33GHz. It is there where I did the same thing with OWB aka Odyssey web browser. On the weakest hardware you can really feel the speed differences better and I did that with the newest Wayfarer 1.16.
This version of Wayfarer is indeed giving speed boosts. Not only for heavy video watching tasks as YouTube but also for doing Amitopia Amiga Magazine website using WordPress. The overall experience is a very positive one.
Uploading images to WordPress with Wayfarer
My main tool for making this site is WordPress. It is fully possible to upload whatever image file that WordPress supports. I mark the images that I want to upload and it works. With Wayfarer 1.16 I feel that MorphOS becomes a nice Amitopia Amiga Magazine tool.
I am using WordPress on my iBook G4 1.33GHz with this update and it is a milestone better again. I love to witness these changes.
The experience of Loading up the WordPress Dashboard is now faster than before this version of Wayfarer. So now the website surfing is more equal between a 1.33GHz and a 1.64GHz PowerPC G4 machine. No reason for not using your PowerPC MorphOS mac for website publishing anymore.
Here in the picture above all of the image files get uploaded nicely as you can see. You can also do it when writing the article, but I wanted to show that multiple file upload works flawlessly too.
The fact that WordPress now works so well. Is indeed making my job with Amitopia Amiga Magazine so much easier. Thanks to Jacek and Harry for this release and I am looking forward to the next updates. Getting these updates is really doing a lot for the operating system and what the community can do for promoting the platform. Much appreciated.
YouTube Wayfarer 1.16 Test
The first load of YouTube is still not the fastest. But once it’s loaded, the player and everything works much faster now. You don’t need to set the user-agent browser to be seen as Chrome or Safari to be able to login into your Google account. In fact, Google wants me to be seen as a Wayfarer user when I login. I can’t login if I use the other useraagents. Don’t know why?
All of the ads in YouTube will be played if you don´t have the AdBlocker on.
Speed differences when watching YouTube
The video plays fine. But there is a black triangle popping up and at different times the player gets distortion issues on my iBook G4. On my PowerBook G4 with a faster CPU, this doesn’t happen. I still find it very impressive to be able to do this on my PowerPC laptops.
Wayfarer 1.16 is doing what no other web browsers is capable of doing today. It shows that the Nextgen Amiga platform MorphOS is progressing a lot.
