Flexible Video Player Library

Hello,

Seeing how the future is so cloudy over here, I’ve decided to dust off a couple of long-forgotten projects and try to bring them to this century.

One of them requires a capable integrated video player. Support for most common formats is sort of a must.

I go to the MAS and I see dozens of players and converters and even subtitle editors supporting tons of formats, way beyond what Quicktime supports. It’s obvious to me they don’t use Quicktime behind the scenes (as at a minimum they’d require the old Quicktime version and Perian).

Most don’t seem to use VLC either, which to my knowledge is the only capable video player library out there that is not bound by the GPL v3 (or gives permission for use in non GPL v3 projects). Other libraries/helper players like mplayer, mplayer2 and mpv are all GPL v3.

I know VLC exists (and that there’re a couple of plug-ins for it). Do you know what other libraries exist out there that could provide this? I’m not asking exclusively for free libraries, since I want to know what’s out there and what is the “common” go-to approach for these things.

My assumption is that if there’re libraries I could leverage, I could then Declare the heck out of them in my code.

Tried ffmpeg?

ffmpeg - lgpl - now this doesn’t mean its not usable but you have to be aware of how to use it correctly in a non-open source project

vlc - much of it is gpl

quicktime was nice architecture for a pluggable media library that could be extended with new decoders / encoders etc
sad apple killed it with no suitable replacement

With HTMLViewer you can play many formats on MAC
(with Perian it plays AVI, QuickTime X does not.)

this is my PLayer with HTMLViewer

I should’ve mentioned it. I could use ffmpeg, but it needs to be a special build ensuring only code compatible with my plans is used. It’s still the best bet, along with VLC. Movist uses ffmpeg, for example.

[quote=190008:@Norman Palardy]ffmpeg - lgpl - now this doesn’t mean its not usable but you have to be aware of how to use it correctly in a non-open source project

vlc - much of it is gpl

quicktime was nice architecture for a pluggable media library that could be extended with new decoders / encoders etc
sad apple killed it with no suitable replacement[/quote]

Quicktime was very nice, only lacking being able to locally load plugins (so as to not force the user to install dependencies). Sadly it’s no longer a practical option for anything outside mov and mp4.

[quote=190015:@Axel Schneider]With HTMLViewer you can play many formats on MAC
(with Perian it plays AVI, QuickTime X does not.)

this is my PLayer with HTMLViewer[/quote]

HTMLViewer doesn’t support any format by itself. It just loads the quicktime web plug-in so it’s limited by Quicktime. As mentioned, Quicktime is not a viable option (I also mentioned Perian)

At the moment the runner-ups are VLC and FFMpeg. ffmpeg seems to be the tool of choice for several (Plex, Movist), with only a bit of license juggling to ensure compliance. VLC has an explicit allowance for the MAS and similar stores for all platforms it supports, which makes it the most viable choice at the moment (having plug-ins for Xojo helps).

In the end FFMPEG and VLC keep in the top as best engines. I’ll check integration options for ffmpeg, since I know VLC is already supported in at least a couple of plugins and declare collections.