[vlc-devel] OS X Help?

[Felix Paul Kühne]

Hello David and Michael,

> My name is David Tome and I am emailing to find out if there is really a need to help support the OS X side of this project?
Well, the Mac port is currently developed by 2 folks (one of them being myself, the other one is Pierre d'Herbemont), who are usually really busy with their university and real lifes. This used to be different in past, but since about one year, both of us where unable to do major contributions to VLC for Mac.

> Also I would like to understand if anyone can tell me how far behind the project is on that front.
Right now, there is a UI in the development branch based upon works from a Google Summer of Code student. This code is unstable and partially unfinished. Additionally, it bloats the UI in a way most of us don't really like it to be. Furthermore, it depends on the current UI code, which is mostly 6 to 8 years old and never heard about any cool concepts of Mac programming.
That's why, Pierre and me launched a re-write of VLC for Mac currently code-named Lunettes. There is some info about it at <http://wiki.github.com/pdherbemont/Glasses> along with the source code. This re-write doesn't include all features of the current VLC.app and is likely miss a few forever as our current goal is to create an easy player virtually anyone could use.

So, there are two options right now:
- vastly improve the existing code base
- contribute to Lunettes (and possibly create a pure streaming application for the Mac as well to cover VLC's streaming server aspects)

> I have considered many times getting involved with the VLC project, but until now I was not aware there was that much need. I have been working on with Apple development technologies since 1995, so I am sure some of my knowledge can help on this front.
> 
> I am also familiar with libmpeg2, liveMedia/live55 and other third party components being used with VLC, so I might also be able to help out in those areas as needed.

This looks really promising. You're absolutely welcome to join us.

@ Michael: coding on the Mac UI doesn't require too much knowledge about video and streaming techniques. If you worked a bit with the QuickTime / QTKit API, you probably feel quite at home with VLCKit in a few days. You'll probably gain more in-depth knowledge over time "automatically". At least, that was true for me as I also started with really basic knowledge about multimedia programming.


It's best to start with a check-out of the VLC repository and a compilation of the current code.

Documentation on the compilation is available on the wiki: <http://wiki.videolan.org/OSXCompile>

The source is at git://git.videolan.org/vlc.git

For Lunettes, check <http://github.com/pdherbemont/Glasses>


Best regards,

Felix


--
VideoLAN
Felix Paul Kühne
Co-Developer of VLC's Mac OS X port
http://www.videolan.org/vlc