[vlc] Sick of OSX version

[Felix Paul Kühne]

On 08.06.2010, at 19:37, Arioch wrote:

> В письме от Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:49:42 +0400, Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb at videolan.org> сообщал:
> 
>> - Apple doesn't give a shit about older versions... Do you know that VLC
> 
> Can some intermediate layer be used for it then ?

Nope, not really. In fact, you can still write apps running on 10.4 to 10.6 with the same code. Have a look at Fetch or Mozilla Firefox for example. However, we figured that we would like to support stuff that was added in 10.5. To support the same functionality on 10.4, you'd have to implement the missing features yourself which is a lot of work. We've done so for some minor stuff (e.g. the font selection panel, video fading animations), but a clean cut is sometimes the best thing you can do. Objective-C 2.0 is 10.5+ only and it simplifies coding a lot.

Supporting 10.3 is impossible btw. because it lacks a bunch of functionality and even requires VLC to be compiled with GCC 4.0.1, because otherwise c++-code-execution will fail (even with this, 10.3.9 will be supported only, no earlier release. To support those, GCC 3.3 is required for compilation...). For 10.6, it makes lot of sense to use GCC 4.2 though especially with regard to 64bit support.

Additionally, IMO, there is the point of market share. Less than 3 per cent still use Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. The devices which cannot be upgraded are the old PowerPC models without FireWire support, coming to mind first-generation iMacs (shipping in 1999 and 2000) with 6 MB VRAM and a 233/266 MHz G3 CPUs, etc. Those devices can't decode modern video data in time anyway.
All later devices with included FireWire support can be updated to 10.4 and if they include a G4 CPU with more than 867 MHz, you can upgrade to 10.5. G4 CPUs with less than 1 GHz are not suited for most modern codecs so it makes sense to use VLC versions originally created for these devices... The 0.8.6 series include another video output module, which is a lot faster on those devices than our current OpenGL-based module.

With regard to market share again, only about 10 per cent of all Mac OS X users still use 10.4. Quite likely, a major share of these folks could move to 10.5. 

So there are 87 per cent of users we can focus our affords on when supporting 10.5 and 10.6 only. With only 2 guys working on VLC for Mac in their spare time from time to time only, I don't think we can seriously support the remaining 13 per cent especially if you have a look at the recent quality issues with the Mac port.


I hope this clarifies the situation a bit.


Best regards,

Felix


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