On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:

> Really exciting new work by Brion to make free/libre video formats
> playable on, erm, not-so-free devices:
>
>
> https://brionv.com/log/2014/07/05/ogvkit-native-ogg-vorbistheora-playing-on-ios/
>

That was a fun experiment, hooking up open-source libraries to the weird
world of Apple and Objective-C. :)


I've also discovered that the GStreamer media framework -- which wraps Ogg
and other codecs in a consistent interface and provides download, playback,
and even mixing logic -- is available as an iOS library, though it could
use some improvements (for instance they don't yet include a 64-bit build).

GStreamer is a C library framework from the Linux/Unix free desktop world
and can be used directly from an Objective-C application on iOS or OS X,
linking in just the free codecs we need... and if we decide we need expert
assistance using or maintaining it we can contract with supporting vendors
like Collabora or Fluendo instead of rolling everything ourselves. This
could make it much easier to implement better streaming, seeking, and
adding WebM playback versus continuing to add them to my OgvKit experiment.

* http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org <- latest open-source dev version
* http://www.gstreamer.com <- commercial support site and a slightly older
SDK

Note that GStreamer itself is LGPL licensed; there is some general FUD out
there about LGPL possibly being incompatible with the Apple App Store, but
a) there are some recommendations around that for proprietary apps, and b)
we're an open source app so we provide all the source that gets linked
against the library anyway, usable by people using the 'standard toolchain'
for iOS.

But it does add several extra megabytes to the application size (probably
more once 64-bit is added), and I don't know how hard it will be to really
use it. It'll go on my weekend experiments rotation, and I'll present my
findings at Wikimania. :D


Either way it'll be at least some months before we get to media playback
support in the Wikipedia app. (It'll be much easier to implement on
Android, since WebM is already supported natively by the OS and the web
view, so media may come to Android before iOS.)

-- brion
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