[opensource-dev] Viewer Tools Upgrades - with a call for help

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2015 19:03:29 -0800, Darien Caldwell wrote:

> I'm pretty sure the reasoning behind LL moving all the multimedia to a
> plugin system was so that 3rd parties could write their own plugins.

I doubt it...

> There's nothing stopping anyone from writing a plugin to take over all
> the functions the old Quicktime plugin does. It's just that nobody has
> bothered to do it.

Don't count on me: I never use the multimedia features myself (if I want
to watch a video stream, listen to music or browse a website, I do it
with the proper, dedicated programs out of the viewer itself... I keep
doing things the UNIX way, i.e. using the right, specialized program/tool
for each special purpose).

However, since LL has concentrated in the past months on improving and
attempting to fix things that don't work properly, I'm simply pointing
out one such thing that would need a serious rework: the whole multimedia
thing is completely outdated in the viewer...

> Quicktime is old, the current version is still compiled for Windows XP,
> and Apple seems to have abandoned it.

Exactly, thus why it's (more than) about time to drop it completely !

> With HTML5, it's pretty much unnecessary in this day and age. Someone
> should just write a new Parcel media plugin and put quicktime to bed
> for good.

HTML5 is just a different way to embbed multimedia contents in a web
page. It still relies on OS-dependent "renderers" that are now however
taken care of by the web browsers (using existing multimedia libraries
for each OS) themselves rather than via third parties plugins. So, HTML5
support won't save LL from implementing proper multimedia support in the
viewer itself (and would require using a built-in browser plugin that
also supports HTML5, which is not the case of the current QT Webkit
plugin), and parcel media is *not* the *real* problem here...

Henri.