[vlc-devel] Re: Sorenson on macosx port

[Florian G. Pflug]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 01:44:57AM +0100, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
> Because it is the only way to display Sorenson on any platform. Mplayer  
> for instance takes similiar approaches to Quicktime and Realplayer.  
> Though they hacked the i386 codecs, which i don't see happening soon  
> for Sorenson on OSX.
But MPlayer enables you to use directshow/quicktime plugins for _windows_ on
_linux_. I agree that its not acceptable to have to reboot to watch a
certain movie file. But I believe it to be quite acceptable to have to start
another application.

> If i have QT i don't need to use vlc at all. VLC is nothing but an  
> application that does a job that many codecs and programs on OSX do.  
> But i want to use everything from one Media Player, and i think VLC can  
> be that one. A complete solution to all my Video files (and audio).
I see, your goal is perfection. Invalidates my former point, since I argued
it would be "acceptable", not perfect ;-)))

> Yes, but then it would require major hacking. for instance i don't see  
> how i could put a .mov in the VLC playlist and play it in that case.  
> this is something i would really like to do.
> i don't want to use the core. i just want to hack the core so that,  
> from a higher up level, i can access a Sorenson file the same way i  
> access every file.
> I just want it to be in the playlist etc. the rest of the core (the  
> entire packet based system) is useless in this case, i know that but i  
> need to know if i can work around it.
Hacking the core is surely much harder than hacking the playlist manager.
You could e.h. modify the playlist to store a callback funktion with each
item, and to call that function if the item shall be played back.

Then the macosx gui could determine which decoding method (vlc or QT) to use
before queueing the file, and associate the correct callback function with
it....

For me it makes more sense to include a _plattform_specific_ alternativ
method of decoding files (like QT) in a plattform specifiy module (like
gui/macosx) instead of including it in the plattform/fileformat/codec
agnostic vlc core.

It _would_ be a very interesting option to split the QuickTime support into
various modules (demux, codec, vout(uses QT already)), but I doubt that this
is possible. Not only is QuickTime not meant for that kind of use, but it's
also not thread-safe (at least QT5 - don't know about 6), quite contrary to
vlc, which makes heavy use of threads. And even if all those problems where
to go away, you would still need to glue to quite different media frameworks
together....

So, in conclusion I think that hacking the interface is the least invasive
and least painfull way of archieving your goal.

greetings, Florian Pflug
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