VLC on OS X 10.1

[Christophe Massiot]

Hello,

À (At) 14:40 -0600 16/10/01, Dave Thorup écrivait (wrote) :

>I'm having trouble getting VLC to run on OS X 10.1.  I downloaded the
>binary from the website and the "vlc.app" application doesn't seem to do
>anything when it is launched.  I tried using vlc from the command line:
>Went to the "vlc.app/Contents/MacOS" directory and ran "./vlc
>dvd:/dev/rdisk1" where /dev/disk1 is the mount point for the DVD.  This
>launched the vlc.app application but didn't do anything.  I had no processor
>activity and vlc was using 0% of the CPU (as shown by top), so I doubt vlc
>was doing any decryption or anything.  I also didn't get any output in the
>Terminal (I would expect to see error messages).

You can get more output with vlc -vvvvv.

>I should mention I'm using OS X 10.1 on a PowerBook G3
>333 Mhz (Lombard) with the Apple-supplied DVD ROM, 384 MB RAM, Sixth
>Sense DVD.  (I don't have any other DVDs with me at the moment, but I'll
>try it on others)

Don't expect VLC to be usable with your configuration. Without 
altivec unit, the G3 processor isn't fast enough to decode DVDs. The 
only way would be to support the acceleration card you have in your 
Lombard. Maybe you can have a look at it, I think Florian had dug 
some core API for accessing this device, we would just need to add 
some wrapper to VLC. If you can gather some info on this...

>I should mention that I'm also a Software Engineer and I'd love to help
>out on the VLC project wherever I can, especially since the Apple DVD
>Player for 10.1 doesn't support my computer.

Help is always welcome :-). One other thing that needs some tuning is 
aout_macosx.c : currently the only way we found to output sound is to 
convert our signed 16 bit samples to floats, which is pretty 
inefficient... I'm confident there is a way to directly output our 16 
bit samples, could you look at it ?

Work is also hard on the interface, but Florian is working on it and 
I don't think duplicating efforts is a good idea. Maybe if he needs 
help he can drop you a mail.


-- 
Christophe Massiot.