LiveCode 8 and a new video player?

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Talluto wrote:

 > On Jun 4, 2015, at 1:37 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >
 >> Already sold: RunRev is committed to delivering a player object
 >> for all supported platforms.
 >
 > Are you under the impression that they are not going to use native
 > hooks for each platform for video playback?

Not at all.  I would expect they'd deliver something very akin to the AV 
revamp of the player object, just for all platforms and written using LCB.

But even with LCB, making all those features is a bit of work.

Since right now we Linux folk have no media support at all (and haven't 
for a long time) I'd be very happy with something less ambitious.

And I'd imagine the net savings for putting in a small number of 
commands in C++ would still be significant over designing and writing 
much more code in LCB.


 >> As I said, I'm not sure of the specifics of their plan for Linux,
 >> so it would be helpful to learn more about which library/framework
 >> they intend to use.  Good ones are available under LGPL.
 >
 > Will this licensing be compatible with the commercial version of
 > LiveCode as well?

Kevin may have other plans I'm not aware of, but on the surface LGPL 
would seem a good fit for both proprietary and GPL use.


 >> Many such frameworks integrate well with D-bus' MPRIS (Media Player
 >> Remote Interfacing Specification), the common interprocess messaging
 >> subsystem installed on most modern distros:
 >> <http://specifications.freedesktop.org/mpris-spec/latest/fullindex.html>
 >
 > The features seem pretty complete. I did not see any transformations
 > like mirroring video. This is something we need.

I would imagine that if Fraser were unleashed on that API for a couple 
days then LiveCode's multimedia support on Linux might exceed anything 
it's ever had before on any platform. :)

But I'd be thrilled enough if it just had startTime.

Oh, and the ability to play a movie without crashing. :)


 >> To address your broader concern about the perceived difficulty of
 >> running multimedia in Linux, all I can say is try it and you'll see
 >> for yourself how far Linux has come today.
 >
 > If the user has to download a 3rd party player, I would not qualify
 > this as out of the box ready. For some markets, that is ok. For
 > others, it can be very expensive to tech support.

The situation with codecs is well understood in the Linux community.  At 
most RunRev's expense is a caveat in the Dictionary entry for related 
commands, as they do now for things like Oracle drivers which have 
special restrictions.

This only seems hard to those who don't use Linux.  But really, I work 
with that community daily; very different set of expections about things 
like codec licensing.

Crashing, on the other hand, is not enjoyed by users of any platform. ;)


Besides, RunRev has already decided to support media playback on Linux. 
The only new question I'm raising here is whether it needs to wait for 
The Ultimate Widget, or could we please have a few lines of C++ to tide 
us over for the next year or so.

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