Compatibility between BeOS and Haiku gui

Hi all.
Yesterday I was starting to work on the recipe for mlnet but… I can’t stick to one thing and began to port Vlc3 to Haiku. It’ve a qt gui but there’s a BeOS native gui in version 0.8.6. A BeOS gui is fully compatible with Haiku or there’re things that need to be translated from one to another?

The same gui code should work on Haiku, but keep in mind, the VLC native GUI code was not updated since 0.8.x and it is created for GCC2, so it will need a complete rework to update it to current programming standards and to VLC3.

I’m not very skilled in C and I’m new to Haiku programming so I think that it’ll more easy to update an ancient but working gui than make all the work from the ground. I don’t want to bit more than I can chew.

In any case vlc is a big project and there’s a lot of work before I can build it. I’m trying to build a minimal vlc and then I’ll begin to look at the gui.

Another question: When porting a project (or developing one from scratch) gcc2 support is desired or it’s only for ancient programs from beos?

p.s. I feel good developing with Haiku. It’s my first experience but I’m enjoying a lot :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

GCC2 is for BeOS support. I think the VLC GUI is C++.

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I assume, a complete new GUI would be easier to do.

AFAIR there were plenty problems with the VLC native GUI, and instead of fixing it, everybody just cannibalized the code to get it compiled, so it had way more functionality than what one can see in 0.8.6 (I think the peak was around 0.7 or so).

The GUI is a collection of decisions about how things should work, UX, etc, and i’m not sure if the 0.8.x GUI still the state-of-the art, i could imagine something sleeker, better, but at least no extra window for the controls.
Haiku got some own and new GUI controls, and layout support, wich would be nice to have too, and this is missing from the old VLC GUI.

So i would say it would be easier to write an entire new, native GUI, with native ao/vo modules (maybe these could be reused from the old code).

But that’s just my ideas and opinions.

There is a working recipe for VCL 2.2.8. See here https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/tree/master/media-video/vlc

Qt5 GUI is perfectly fine for now as VLC on Haiku lacks audio and video output modules and this what needs to be writtend to make it usable. Native GUI can come later if someone wants to do that.

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Is there a vlc version without gui?
Runable from bash?

No, but try pkgman install cmd:ffplay. It provides a very minimal player, with a window for video output but no on screen display. Everything is controlled by keyboard shortcuts.

Would love to see a newer version of VLC available for Haiku.

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Then do it :wink:

I’ve almost build it but I’m facing a problem at linking stage. I’ll try to find some time this week to fix it and perhaps next weekend I can publish the recipe.