[vlc-devel] Running interface on the main thread

[Juho Vähä-Herttua]

On 17.6.2010, at 23.52, Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:26:47PM +0200, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote :
>> It would be a huge amount of work. But J-B has consistently opposed this
>> change, so it is a moot question.
> 
> Yes/No. I don't oppose the change, I said that I wouldn't do it. Who
> would then? GUIs are boring, boring and boring to do, and to polish.

I come from the XMMS2 world, a project that has lost a lot of its small momentum during last one or two years. The main reason? There's no good GUI that everyone could use and that would work without problems. The APIs are very simple, easy, and powerful. This results in everyone hacking together what they need and not making an effort on a good user interface.

In short, really good API with no standard user interface is going to be a failure. :P Having GUI as a module that attaches itself to the "daemon" library sounds horrible, to be honest, but if it works for VLC and makes people work on a good GUI, then great!

> To finish, I believe we can fix the OSX GUI without changing the core,
> and we should do that.

The old OSX GUI uses the hack mentioned earlier by Erwan, it steals the whole main thread from VLC and happily runs its own main loop there. That's what I just did with the Qt4 interface in my tree and it happily steals the VLC main thread now on OSX. Downside is that everything that's supposed to happen after opening the interface never executes, but apparently VLC has been able to live with it before...

If someone removes that hack, then Mac interface as a module is not possible and it's only Lunettes left, but at its current state I'd rather have options. And no matter what people say, I actually kind of liked the old OSX interface. :)

> Let's not troll too much on that, anyway, the slow work on Lunettes
> proves a bit more my point. Doing interfaces is boring, grateless and not fun.

I completely agree on that.

> The normal OSX gui can be fixed, if someone really wants it.

I think it probably shouldn't be that hard either, just have to replace the vout, everything else compiled the last time I checked. And the current macosx vout module seems a bit overly simple, so that might have to be extended first.


Juho