[vlc] Skinning under MacOSX

[Felix Paul Kühne]

On 04.11.2009, at 09:39, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:

> 
>   Hallo,
> 
> On Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:21:44 +0100, Roman Schlikow <roman.schlikow at web.de>
> wrote:
>> I'm a Design student from cologne and working actually on Interface
>> Designs. For that reason I want to create an easy-to-use/intuitive skin
> for
>> your great player that's really mighty, but difficult to use.
> Unfortunately
>> your MacOSX version doesn't support skinning - why?
> 
> The VLC skin engine has back-ends for Windows, X11 and MacOS, so it
> _should_ be possible. I do not know the standard MacOS interface, so maybe
> the feature is simply not visible in the menus, but it should be in the
> Preferences panel.

The skin back-end is a stub for Mac OS X, which doesn't provide any functionality. Additionally, it wouldn't be unlikely if it doesn't even compile as lots of Carbon API calls are being used in the current code. Most of these (QuickDraw, Carbon Window Manager, to name a few) are deprecated in Mac OS X 10.4 and later (released in 2005).

Concerning skins for a VideoLAN-based product, I'd like to direct Roman's attention to Pierre's and my Lunettes project. Lunettes is what used to be referred to as VLC Light for Mac, quick and fast media player with unlimited simultaneous videos within a single instance and all required playback controls based upon libvlc (though VLCKit). Lunettes won't include any active streaming or converting support for now though.
Anyway, Lunettes is fully skinable using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript wrapped in a custom plugin format. Everything is rendered using WebKit including all animation and transparency effects. We only have about 3 skins available right now, so if you like to contribute to this sub-project instead, you're absolutely welcome.


Best regards,

Felix


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