[vlc-devel] Gui for Mozilla's plugins

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le lundi 21 septembre 2009 15:04:36 Alexandre Millet, vous avez écrit :
> - Qt, is very simple to use, extremely portable but the weight of the
> dependencies may be high, QtGui + QtCore exceed 10mb.

Too heavy... to GTK integrists and MacOS users, but not the majority of VLC 
users with VLC built in Qt4 in the first place. The problem is, on Windows, 
linking dynamically does not quite work because Windows 2000 is so broken.

> - GTK+ is slighter than Qt but it is not built with portability in
> mind (especially on Windows).

It works on Windows - don't Wireshark and GIMP use it? I'm not so sure about 
MacOS.

> - The GUI can also be made in XUL, the downside in that it won't work
> on other browsers that support the NSPlugin API (opera, webkit, ...).

...

> - The fourth solution would be to integrate the GUI into the VLC core
> and inject the user interface directly into the VLC vout.

That could work if you want to do On-Screen Display, although VLC core support 
for this is present but not very good at the moment.

That's not going to work if you want to add a separate control bar at the 
bottom. Then you'd need to deal with the windowing system, and you're back to 
square 1 with portability issues:

> - The last solution would be to use native code. This implies that the
> GUI must be developped one time for each platform and is a pain to
> maintain.
> 
> What is your opinion on this?

My opinion is that there is no silver bullet.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/