[vlc-devel] CIL bindings and brain dump on LibVLC

[Olivier Aubert]

> First, I was badly confused with the old mediacontrol_ APIs still being there. 
> libvlc-control is now a nasty mess providing two competing APIs - in the same 
> shared object! Second, the mediacontrol_ ABI has been silently broken from 
> 0.8.6 (contrary to the promise not to do so). I am considering reverting my 
> changes to mediacontrol, but that won't solve this problem. As such, I would 
> really consider REMOVING mediacontrol_ from 0.9.0 completely.
-999

There are indeed 2 competing API, with 2 different focuses: libvlc
intends to provide access to VLC features, mediacontrol aims at
providing a generic interface to control a video player (and it thus not
VLC-specific). The libvlc API is more featureful, and begins to get
cleaner, but I think it still needs some time to stabilize. Please bear
in mind that some people (like me) are using VLC for their projects, and
cannot afford to track the almost-daily changes to the libvlc
controlling API, since our main focus is on our application, not on VLC.

The mediacontrol API has been mostly stable for almost 2 years, while I
think the libvlc one has not seen a period of stability longer than 2
weeks. This is not a bad thing per se, evolution is necessary. But some
stability is also needed. With both interfaces, we can get both, at
least for the next release of VLC. I have no problem of seeing
mediacontrol marked as deprecated, if you really hate it. But do not
underestimate the work and time needed by other programmers to adapt
existing code.

Olivier