tbodine wrote:

> Richard Gaskin wrote
>> The team patched a few bugs in their Windows media playback a
>> few versions back, so if you haven't tried it recently you may
>> be pleasantly surprised.
>
> Richard, can you elaborate? Which version or which bugs?

I read the Release Notes for every build that comes out. To find the issues resolved I'd have to replicate that effort, or anyone here could do the same:
<http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/>

But that would be tedious, and given the potential for regressions not especially useful compared with the simpler alternative:

Use the latest v7.1 build and see what happens when you use the player object on a system without QuickTime installed.

This is far simpler than wading through the last dozen or so Release Notes, and will give you a very specific understanding of the state of the engine as it relates to your project's media needs.

Of course if you find any outstanding issues please report them - since media playback issues have been outstanding for such a long time for both Windows and Linux, before filing a new report it may be useful to first do a quick search to see if one has already been reported, and if so add your notes about your system version and LC version along with you recipe to the report:
<http://quality.runrev.com/>



> Richard Gaskin wrote
>>  ... under the current plan I don't
>> expect to see media playback for Win or Linux overhauled for at
>> least another year, if not longer, so we need to explore other
>> solutions for now.
>
> That's a scary long time for us multimedia developers.

Not necessarily, at least not for folks deploying to Windows (which I hope is everyone here because they continue to enjoy some 86% of the desktop market).

It may be that the improvements on Windows thus far will satisfy most needs. It may even be that polling callbacks is not much more CPU intensive than relying on system-media-engine callback messages (can't say because I'm running Linux right now - more on that in a moment).

If there are enough outstanding needs for improved media playback on Windows, giving the staggering importance of that platform it would seem self-evident that it's in the company's interest to reevaluate priorities accordingly.

But please keep this in mind: Apple killed QuickTime quite some time ago, and the number of posts here with "scary" stories about their Windows apps has been few.

Give it a go, let's evaluate what's working and not working, and move forward with real actionable information. With any luck the situation may not be that scary at all.

At least for Windows.

On Linux, an anecdote:

<dimissanleRamblingsOnlyForReadersWithTooMuchTimeOnTheirHands>

Last night I literally had a dream in which I rapidly built a video player in Linux using LiveCode.

I was several minutes into it, with a list field that let me select video files which would play in a player control, every bit as easily and reliably as I'd enjoyed on my Mac, but here I was using the OS made by my friends on the Ubuntu team.

At some point in the dream I had a lucid moment in which I asked myself, "Am I dreaming? Players don't work in LiveCode on Linux."

Shortly afterward I woke up, and re-entered the world my lucid dreaming self had so accurately recalled.

Video used to be simple on Linux in MetaCard, but for many years it's been completely broken in LiveCode, worse with each release. First videos stuttered with artifacts, then a couple versions later they played with black areas rendered as transparent, and in the last several "stable" releases spanning a year or two simply setting the filename property of a player object to any valid media file, files that play marvelously in all the other media apps I have installed, bring LiveCode to its knees with a hard crash.

Windows developers don't know how good they have it. :)

It would be super cool if I were in a position to dictate to my users what computers they should buy, or do as one of my friends does and bundle computers with my software to avoid OS-specific issues.

But it turns out I have no such sway with my customers. I simply can't require them to throw their computers away and replace them with Macs just to run my application.

Instead, I have to deliver to any OS LiveCode is said to support. And in time, perhaps it will work as described.

</dimissanleRamblingsOnlyForReadersWithTooMuchTimeOnTheirHands>

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Fourth World Systems
 Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
 ____________________________________________________________________
 ambassa...@fourthworld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com

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