LiveCode 8 and a new video player?

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Talluto wrote:

 > Native playback on all platforms would be fantastic. My guess is that
 > Mac and Win are going to be easier due to both OS having the blocks
 > to play with.

Windows has had a native multimedia API for a long time, but last I read 
the API still in use in LC was deprecated more than a decade ago and has 
issues with certain codecs, along with the aforementioned absence of 
startTime.

QT dependency was never anyone's first choice on Windows; all of us 
faced complaints from customers who had to install some massive 
subsystem from another OS vendor just to play movies.

Now with QT gone and the Win-native API used in LC deprecated, the 
thought of waiting another six to 12 months for a solution on that 
platform gives me and my clients an unpleasant feeling.


 > Linux on the other hand, to its benefit and detriment, does not have
 > this for media. My last look at all of this left me very
 > uncomfortable with how a solution for Linux will come about. MPlayer
 > looked good, but licensing issues seemed to plague it. Which media
 > layer can LiveCode rely on for Linux? Will the layer be installed by
 > default on all Linux boxes?

Issues with multimedia playback in mature distros like Fedora and Ubuntu 
are as obsolete as mplayer. :)  The situation is apparently working 
nicely today, since there are hundreds of apps for audio and video 
playback and editing that run well on most modern GUI distros.  VLC on 
my Ubuntu box handles a larger number of different codecs than Apple's 
video player app on OS X.

Whichever framework the team had in mind for their Widget would be a 
good place to start.  If they just had start, stop, currentTime, and 
startTime as I mentioned we can take care of the rest ourselves, and 
then they don't need to spend any time writing the rest of The Ultimate 
Multimedia Widget.

I don't know which framework the RunRev team is planning to use.

This isn't my area of speciality (though it may have to become so if I 
wind up needing to write this myself), and Mark Wieder may have a more 
informed opinion, but if I had to start such a project today I'd 
consider GStreamer or ffmpeg, both available under LGPL:
<http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/>
<https://www.ffmpeg.org/>

There may be other good ones as well.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com