Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

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mhoneywill
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Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

Post by mhoneywill » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:39 am

I'm aware of the limitations of using Quicktime with Livecode, I'm also a very happy user of VLC media player http://www.videolan.org/

Until recently the core VLC engine was licensed as GPL so it could not be included in commercial applications, this has now changed to an LGPL licence see
http://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl-libvlc.html this opens up some very interesting possibilities in creating a cross platform media engine in Livecode which would remove Livecode's dependence on Quicktime.

See http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/389 ... und-libvlc for an example of what can be done.

The libVLC engine is available for Windows, Mac, Linux
It was available for iOS but was pulled from the app store because it was GPL, this means the core engine it could be built for iOS again I think http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html
It also looks like people are looking at android to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-android.html

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/13/27949 ... s-download

I've not got the time or the experience to develop an external to do this but I think this is a very interesting area to explore.

What do other people think, is this a direction worth looking at?.

Cheers Martin

gpb01
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Re: Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

Post by gpb01 » Sat Jun 09, 2012 9:54 am

Very interesting, thanks for reporting !

For sure ... requires more investigation ... ;)

Guglielmo

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Re: Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

Post by mwieder » Fri Jun 15, 2012 5:47 pm

Thanks - I wasn't aware that the license had changed to LGPL. However, having been down that road, I can say that this probably isn't going to work. There are a number of reasons:

I have also been a happy VLC user for many years. VLC relies on a library of third-party plugins, each of which has its own licensing scheme. So the fact that the code for VLC and libvlc are LGPL doesn't change the licensing agreements for the codecs in the library. And without the codecs VLC by itself is useless.

Libvlc relies on the vlc directory structure, both for the vlc libraries it links to and for the third-party codecs. The absolute location on a computer doesn't matter, but the relative locations to each other is not changeable. Any LiveCode external library that uses libvlc would require that VLC be installed on the computer as a prerequisite.

The internals of libvlc are well documented, thus making the creation of an external library fairly easy but a lot of work. However, figuring out how to use the library is left to the imagination. There are a handful of very simple examples of calling the code from various languages, but most of these are out of date and most of the library calls have no examples at all.

The VLC developers are linux-centric and have little interest in supporting Windows or OSX or any other platform. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't, you're on your own - the source code is there - just make it work. Being linux-centric isn't necessarily a bad thing, but... in my experimenting with libvlc I was able to crash in OSX on stopping a playing video. I would be happy to say that the crash was in my code because then I could fix it. But the crash log seemed to show that the crash was in the LiveCode engine link to the vlc library that libvlc was linked to - some process was still running even though it had been told to quit.

PaoloMazza
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Re: Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

Post by PaoloMazza » Thu Jun 21, 2012 9:45 am

Having a multi platform solution to manage video in LC applications would be great.
At the moment if is a mess ... QUICKTIME for MACOS, HTML5/Mpeg4 for iOS, ??? for Windows and Linux
We really need this implementation, and as far as I know VLC could be the right solution.
I would be interested in an external library for VLC to manage videos in LC.
Any of you will be able to develop this?
All the best,
Paolo
Paolo Mazza
Italy

Klaus
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Re: Idea's for VLC support - A replacement for Quicktime

Post by Klaus » Thu Oct 18, 2012 10:43 am

Hi friends,

maybe this is of interest for you?
http://forums.runrev.com/phpBB2/viewtop ... =4&t=13168


Best

Klaus

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