Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

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Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Fri Apr 15, 2016 3:47 pm

Since yesterday the warning is out: Uninstall Quicktime for Windows now! Since serious security problems were found in Quicktime (Windows) and Apple is not issueing security updates for Quicktime (Windows) any more, even Apple recommends to uninstall Quicktime from all Windows PCs. It's considered deprecated.

Disaster! All Windows multimedia software written in Livecode I am selling and earning my living with, depends on Quicktime. I am using a lot of players for playing audio (and moving around in audiofiles) video and so on... Now my costumers will uninstall Quicktime and blame my company for their programs not working any more...

This is also a serious strike against Livecode on Windows in general.

Does anybody know a solution how to play, move inside and record audiofiles in LiveCode without Quicktime??

Happy for any idea!

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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by FourthWorld » Fri Apr 15, 2016 4:47 pm

Video and audio playback has been supported in LiveCode the native Windows playback engine for years. There are certain features and codecs that required QuickTime, but many projects have been running well on Windows without QT.

Kevin noted on the use-livecode list this morning that the team is well aware of the situation and has been working on a solution. Indeed, depending on a third-party package like QT for video and audio playback on Windows has never been ideal, and the team has been exploring native solutions for some time.

Have you tried your files on Windows without QT? If you've had difficulties, what codecs and/or features were not working for you?
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by richmond62 » Fri Apr 15, 2016 6:09 pm

depending on a third-party package like QT for video and audio playback on Windows has never been ideal
Let's rephrase that to:

Depending on a third-party package like QT for video and audio playback on any operating system has never been ideal,

and some of us have been banging on, Cassandra-like, for years about this.

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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Fri Apr 15, 2016 6:56 pm

I will explore this further, but I remember very well that media playback was quite unreliable without Quicktime - it worked after a lot of trying on my systems, but not on all of my costumers' computers. And I never managed to record anything without Quicktime. (I am making language learning software where the user has the option to record his own voice.) I wouldn't know how to do this without QT... Is there any OpenSource engine that could be used easily in LiveCode? (as an interim solution)?
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by FourthWorld » Fri Apr 15, 2016 7:00 pm

richmond62 wrote:Depending on a third-party package like QT for video and audio playback on any operating system has never been ideal,

and some of us have been banging on, Cassandra-like, for years about this.
The new multimedia framework is been slated to use LC Builder to wrap the API calls. LC Builder is premiering in v.8, now in RC and approaching Stable soon.

If you have specific technical guidance you can offer the team on how they can move faster and more cost-effectively on this while also handling the other priorities we ask them to do, such advice would be very valuable.
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:19 am

Video and audio playback has been supported in LiveCode the native Windows playback engine for years. There are certain features and codecs that required QuickTime, but many projects have been running well on Windows without QT.
Really??? I have been working with LiveCode for almost ten years now. And apart from playing single WAV files I have hardly ever managed to include audio features in a program without using Quicktime. Other users have reported the same problems for a long time!

How are you moving around in an audio file without QT? (Play from/to a certain position inside the file)

How are you using callbacks without QT?

How are you recording audio from a microphone without QT?

I've sold many hundred copies of my language course done in LiveCode, and now the first customers told me they have uninstalled Quicktime as was recommended officially. And they want me to find a solution...

How do I go on? Is there any way to record and play audio reliably without QT in Windows?

Is there any *external* or workaround to replace QT? (Franklin Audio seems to have completely disappeared without any trace)

Does anybody know a way to record audio from a microphone in Windows? "SoX Audio" could do it, but nobody has managed to control it properly from LiveCode afaik...

I feel completely lost here. When I googled, I found LiveCode promises from 2012 to establish an independent audio/video system in LiveCode soon. It was part of the crowdfunding as well.

I'm promoting LiveCode here in Germany all the time. But I will not accept massive price rises for a system that does not include a reliable and usable sound/video engine for Windows. So far it was only irritating, but now since users are forced to remove Quicktime from Windows, it breaks my neck as a multimedia developer.

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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by richmond62 » Sun Apr 17, 2016 2:45 pm

I found LiveCode promises from 2012
There's been quite a lot of that.

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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by MaxV » Mon Apr 18, 2016 1:45 pm

VLC videoplayer is well supported and is on every platform. Also MPlayer is very good and has an encoder included.
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by Klaus » Mon Apr 18, 2016 1:51 pm

Buongiorno Max,
MaxV wrote:VLC videoplayer is well supported and is on every platform. Also MPlayer is very good and has an encoder included.
yes, sure, but we need and want an INTERNAL (inside of LC) solution! 8)

Having to script the use of an external app on Windows (via SHELL commands?) will make development unneccessarily complex and tedious.
No, thank you! :D

However I am very confident, that the mothership will come up with a great solution in the near future!


Best

Klaus

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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Mon Apr 18, 2016 3:26 pm

I agree with Klaus! It takes a lot of time and unacceptable compromises to use external programs for simple things like playing a video or audio file.

What I found out - and this is trial and error, because there is no documentation on the subject as far as I know:

When using Windows without Quicktime:

-It is possible to play WAV files directly by using "play PATH/audiofile.wav"
- It is possible to use a player object (with reduced functionality)
- The player object won't play WAV files.
- But: The player object will play mp3 files.
- With mp3 files it is possible to read position data inside the audio file and jump to a certain position.
- It is even possible to play multiple players with mp3 files simultaneously

That is quite good for my purposes, but I still don't know if this works on other platforms than Windows 10.

- I haven't found a way to record sound (WAV) without Quicktime
- I haven't found a way to play an mp4 or AVI video without Quicktime

That is bad. I might play the video through a web browser...

I still don't know any good solution for recording the mic. There seems to be no simple way to do it.

I expect more from LiveCode - I hope something happens very soon!

Kroka
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by [-hh] » Mon Apr 18, 2016 5:31 pm

I seldom use Windows, that's why I ask a bit naive:
Why don't you use the on-board-OS soundrecorder/voicerecorder?
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Mon Apr 18, 2016 7:52 pm

Well, Windows is Windows... there are different sound recorders in different Windows versions. They can be started through a shell command - but what I need is start and stop functionality, and that's a lot more difficult. It doesn't give you the possibilities of a controllable sound recorder.

All I need is being able to start a recording when the user presses the record button and end it when the user releases the button. No problem with Quicktime. But without? There doesn't seem to be any easy option. I'm not a C-programmer, so I wouldn't be able to write my own extension. Maybe someone has done this before or knows about any way to do this with an easy enough tool?
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by [-hh] » Mon Apr 18, 2016 9:01 pm

On Win 7, some months ago, I used the following

Code: Select all

on mouseUp
   ---
   set hideconsolewindows to true
   get shell("soundRecorder /file test.wav")
   ---
end mouseUp
This checks first the micro, but at latest after a second the system recorder (start/stop) window appears. And writes the recording to a WAV file. May work as a substitute for a while ...
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by kroka » Wed Apr 20, 2016 11:41 am

Thank you for this idea.

Unfortunately it is not working with Windows 10 (there might be some variation that works in a similar way though) but it is not really satisfying in the context of a complex program (in your well designed speechlab application you don't really want some Windows recorder window pop up somewhere that disappears again after you made your recording...)

Well, it's a point to start with further exploration. But our hope remains that LiveCode comes up with a better solution.
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Re: Help! No more Quicktime on Windows - and now??

Post by richmond62 » Wed Apr 20, 2016 10:08 pm

Until the Livecode people make good their promise of an in-built, cross platform media delivery system
the while media playing "scene" is a mess.

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