Quicktime in Windows 10?

[Richard Gaskin]

tbodine wrote:

 > Richard Gaskin wrote
 >> The team patched a few bugs in their Windows media playback a
 >> few versions back, so if you haven't tried it recently you may
 >> be pleasantly surprised.
 >
 > Richard, can you elaborate? Which version or which bugs?

I read the Release Notes for every build that comes out.  To find the 
issues resolved I'd have to replicate that effort, or anyone here could 
do the same:
<http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/>

But that would be tedious, and given the potential for regressions not 
especially useful compared with the simpler alternative:

Use the latest v7.1 build and see what happens when you use the player 
object on a system without QuickTime installed.

This is far simpler than wading through the last dozen or so Release 
Notes, and will give you a very specific understanding of the state of 
the engine as it relates to your project's media needs.

Of course if you find any outstanding issues please report them - since 
media playback issues have been outstanding for such a long time for 
both Windows and Linux, before filing a new report it may be useful to 
first do a quick search to see if one has already been reported, and if 
so add your notes about your system version and LC version along with 
you recipe to the report:
<http://quality.runrev.com/>



 > Richard Gaskin wrote
 >>  ... under the current plan I don't
 >> expect to see media playback for Win or Linux overhauled for at
 >> least another year, if not longer, so we need to explore other
 >> solutions for now.
 >
 > That's a scary long time for us multimedia developers.

Not necessarily, at least not for folks deploying to Windows (which I 
hope is everyone here because they continue to enjoy some 86% of the 
desktop market).

It may be that the improvements on Windows thus far will satisfy most 
needs.  It may even be that polling callbacks is not much more CPU 
intensive than relying on system-media-engine callback messages (can't 
say because I'm running Linux right now - more on that in a moment).

If there are enough outstanding needs for improved media playback on 
Windows, giving the staggering importance of that platform it would seem 
self-evident that it's in the company's interest to reevaluate 
priorities accordingly.

But please keep this in mind:  Apple killed QuickTime quite some time 
ago, and the number of posts here with "scary" stories about their 
Windows apps has been few.

Give it a go, let's evaluate what's working and not working, and move 
forward with real actionable information.  With any luck the situation 
may not be that scary at all.

At least for Windows.

On Linux, an anecdote:

<dimissanleRamblingsOnlyForReadersWithTooMuchTimeOnTheirHands>

Last night I literally had a dream in which I rapidly built a video 
player in Linux using LiveCode.

I was several minutes into it, with a list field that let me select 
video files which would play in a player control, every bit as easily 
and reliably as I'd enjoyed on my Mac, but here I was using the OS made 
by my friends on the Ubuntu team.

At some point in the dream I had a lucid moment in which I asked myself, 
"Am I dreaming?  Players don't work in LiveCode on Linux."

Shortly afterward I woke up, and re-entered the world my lucid dreaming 
self had so accurately recalled.

Video used to be simple on Linux in MetaCard, but for many years it's 
been completely broken in LiveCode, worse with each release.  First 
videos stuttered with artifacts, then a couple versions later they 
played with black areas rendered as transparent, and in the last several 
"stable" releases spanning a year or two simply setting the filename 
property of a player object to any valid media file, files that play 
marvelously in all the other media apps I have installed, bring LiveCode 
to its knees with a hard crash.

Windows developers don't know how good they have it. :)

It would be super cool if I were in a position to dictate to my users 
what computers they should buy, or do as one of my friends does and 
bundle computers with my software to avoid OS-specific issues.

But it turns out I have no such sway with my customers.  I simply can't 
require them to throw their computers away and replace them with Macs 
just to run my application.

Instead, I have to deliver to any OS LiveCode is said to support.  And 
in time, perhaps it will work as described.

</dimissanleRamblingsOnlyForReadersWithTooMuchTimeOnTheirHands>

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