VLC on OS X 10.1

[Florian G. Pflug]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 01:23:45AM +0200, Christophe Massiot 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.
There seems to have been a bug in the CSS code for OSX. Eugenio Jarosiewicz
fixed it in CVS I think, so you could try compiling a new vlc from cvs.

> >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...
Well, there is h/w support, which seems to be part of IOKit. I looked at the
symbols defined in ATIRage128DVDDriver (a .bundle in
/System/Library/Extensions - don't know exactly what a .bundle is).

I defined some interesting function like DVDOpenDevice, DVDDecodeFrame,...
but I think this driver is closed source, and there seem to be no Headers.
That's why I am unsure that this is useable for vlc.

> >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.
I have basic functionality working (a time slider, play, pause). At the
moment you can't open files/discs/network-streams from the interface, and
there is no fullscreen-mode (The interface uses the Cocoa-API and I don't
know how to switch to fullscreen there).

If anyone is interested in helping me hacking on this I can mail patches, or
put them online somewhere

greetings, Florian Pflug