Greetings, Callum suggested that this info would be forwarded to Oz, but since it is also of interest to the TPV developers at large, I'm posting it here for everyone's benefit.
Note that Nicky also came with an additional argument in gstreamer's favour: as a stand-alone installation (instead of a bundle distributed with the viewer), it will get updated (either via the packaging system of the Linux distribution, or via its auto-updater for other OSes), ensuring all security holes/vulnerabilities are plugged over time, independently of the viewer version in use. Regards, Henri. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Begin forwarded message: Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 23:00:14 +0200 From: Henri Beauchamp <sl...@free.fr> To: "Callum Prentice (Callum)" <cal...@lindenlab.com> Cc: "Nicky D." <sl.nicky...@googlemail.com> Subject: libVLC plugin Greetings ! It's been only a couple of weeks that I could look in details into the QuickTime plugin replacement issue, and at your viewer-vlc branch. .../... [edited out: no more relevant] Also, I had a fructuous exchange with Nicky Dasmijn last week: he got a gstreamer v1.0 plugin, and I got it working nicely in the Cool VL Viewer under both Linux (which already got a gstreamer v0.10 plugin) and Windows. It should also be possible to compile it with the MacOS-X viewer binaries. The BIG advantage of gstreamer over VLC is that it got a stable API and pre-built binaries for all OSes (Linux of course, but also Windows and MacOS-X), meaning you don't need to distribute any of the plugin codecs but *just* the plugin itself, saving about 200Mb of space in the viewer binary package ! Also, the potential (even if highly dubious) patent issue gets immediately solved, since it becomes the responsibility of the final users to install "patented" codecs or not on their system. In contrast, the libVLC plugin must be distributed together with all the VLC libraries and codecs/plugins, because the API changes almost with every new VLC version (I tried: even VLC v2.0 and v2.2 libraries are incompatible... I'm not even speaking about v3.0). By adopting gstreamer v1.0 in place of VLC, the users would just have to install a gstreamer distribution once and for all on their system (like it was the case for QuickTime under Windows, or gstreamer v0.10 under Linux), and the viewer binary bundles would stay slim enough. The gstreamer distribution is available here: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/ Also, the "pre-built library" package for compiling a gstreamer plugin only consists in header files (meaning no need for you to bother re- building gstreamer libraries for each OS), since the plugin loads its libraries and codecs only at run-time: much simpler than VLC ! .../... [edited out: flipping media texture issue, now solved] Finally, VLC (v2.1 and later) got its sound backend totally screwed up (for example, it won't work properly anymore under Linux with OSS as the sound driver), and its sound volume is also totally out of sync with the volume of other plugins (you'll need to push the VLC volume up to about 125% to get something equivalent to other plugins volume at 100%, but it's alas not even just an issue of a 1.25 multiplier: the volume difference in non-linear with other plugins). I would therefore recommend that you ask Nicky for his plugin and give it a try. I know I said on the list that I was pretty neutral between the VLC and the gstreamer plugins, but now, I definitely opted for gstreamer for the Cool VL Viewer (I can't afford wasting over one full hour uploading four 200Mb viewer packages at each new release, i.e. every week for my viewer)... Best regards, Henri. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
