Hey…
Is there any way to compile VLC 1.x in Haiku? I am tired of using the crusty 0.86i version. It’s getting long in the tooth in terms of lacking support for newer formats. Thanks!
Guru
You’re using 0.8.6i? Where did you get it from? Because I’m stuck with 0.8.6d. 
Compiling newer VLC for Haiku is difficult. If it was easy then it would have been done already.
VLC above 0.8.6 has become less compatible with BeOS (& Haiku) meaning it needs fixing & updating ( coding work ). VLC supported BeOS not Haiku. I believe the VLC being used is compiled on BeOS.
Also, to compile VLC requires lots & lots of dependencies. Not fun. VLC & dependencies are meant to compile on BeOS and need re-working (re-coding) to compile on Haiku.
You won’t see VLC above 0.8.6 until developers jump in and start coding it to support Haiku.
Ok… thank you for that. Also, I mean’t 0.86d.
Dang I hope we can get an updated VLC then. I guess we might have to wait for Haiku to hit beta first before we can do anything else…
Guru
I think haiku ports (ports.haiku-files.org) is working on it, if you want to help up just join the mailing list there.
The original VLC maintainer for BeOS (Eric Petit) posted a message the other day on one of Haiku’s mailing lists, so I guess he’s still following Haiku with a passion. Whether or not he decides to continue with the VLC port really depends on his time/interests. But as richienyhus already mentioned, the code is open and guys working on Haiku ports are desperate for help.
For those wondering.
Short interview with Eric Petit @ Haikuware
http://www.haikuware.com/20090609382/mini-interview-with-eric-petit-porter-of-transmission
VLC 1.x will be lots of work. Don’t expect it anytime soon. The faster Haiku attracts developers interested in VLC the quicker it’ll get done. Could be 1, 2 or 3+ years from now.
I still use VLC 0.8.6 and it works great for me. I just played a 1080p divx trailer the other day on VLC in Haiku.
Here is the last go at getting a haiku native (non-beos) binary complied:
http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/media-video/vlc/0.8.6i/1
Its from some while ago, so maybe something has changed in the meantime.
Last i heard, the VLC guys were removing the native BeOS GUI code for 1.x - and they wanted us to port Qt instead (I heard this directly from a VLC dev visiting our booth at LinuxWorld 2008)
Whether they indeed removed it or not, I don’t know.
Also, it was going to require GCC4 - which really isn’t a problem for us now
I did a quick search on VLC’s trac for beos & noticed they are removing a little more than just the GUI.
http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/changeset/0c77eb7ff62cfcfaa7bd250b11135c80f8625699
http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/changeset/52d3152aa4e20d19025a6e6c42e14e0cf588f97d
http://trac.videolan.org/vlc/changeset/cce79ee586b4ccd3863690c535eeb4f77c793b27
These will have to be updated & added back in. You might start to see other VLC devs removing BeOS code because it’s outdated. Very slowly stripping BeOS support away.
Qt is likely coming to Haiku someday. For those that missed it:
http://www.haikuware.com/20091007436/qt4-port-status
So, that’ll at least help by removing need for custom BeOS GUIs. Using Qt is good to get Haiku started out by easily porting KDE applications to Haiku = more software on Haiku ( good thing ).
Well, at least some of the stuff they removed probably doesn’t have to be added back in (like the BeOS thread support, and some of the beos-specific hacks)…
So I’d say it’s probably best if it was freshly ported to Haiku anyway 
As for Qt apps being good for Haiku… I’m certain some will disagree, as they don’t look like or function like native apps… but that’s a discussion for a different day.
“As for Qt apps being good for Haiku… I’m certain some will disagree, as they don’t look like or function like native apps…”
I agree with you. I prefer native Haiku (BeOS) applications too but having Qt will attract more end users, developers and make porting Linux applications easier and faster. If more people move to Haiku because of it and more applications to play with then maybe a good thing?
I too hope that new developers work on native programs instead of porting Qt applications. I believe starting with ports and moving to native applications will move Haiku forward faster, ie: larger and faster acceptance. But I worry that having Qt may discourage developers from creating native programs and maybe turn Haiku more into Linux.
umccullough and tonestone57:
I agree with you both. We need native apps but qt help porting many needed apps too. However VLC 1.x I would prefer as native Haiku apps but VLC guys are lazy asses wanting to use ready qt instead of porting on newly Haiku API.
In their defence, the whole reason QT was created was to be cross-platform. If the reason VLC is dropping other platforms is in order to move everything over to a single QT codebase, I wouldn’t say they’re lazy-asses, that’s just good coding practice when you have to support a large number of platforms. The alternative would be having six different interface codebases which have to be kept in sync. It’s just unfortunate for us that Haiku doesn’t support QT very well yet. Of course, native intuitively feels “better” for the users that use that platform, but from the perspective of the application developers, I can understand why a single codebase would seem “better”. Of course using something like QT means they might not have the option to take advantage of various BeOS-specific functionality, but VLC is exactly the same on all it’s platforms anyway, so they don’t use any of those features.
Why not concentrate on good MPlayer port instead with a native GUI front end? Mplayer has much better support for videos than VLC. I use “MPlayer OS X extended” on OS X and it plays 99.9% of all files that I try. MPlayer OS X extended is well integrated and really feels like a native app, so I don’t see why the same can’t be done on a Haiku port.
You’re failing to see the benefit of Haiku’s native media player:
It uses the media kit.
This means the player itself is only a front-end, and all of the media encoding/decoding is done by the media kit which can be used by any application to provide media capabilities.
This means that a developer can provide video/audio capabilities in any application (think BePodder or the web browser for example).
This is something you do not get if you port a media player with all of its included codecs in a proprietary format that the rest of the OS cannot use. You’re thinking very narrowly if you believe that a single application is all a user would ever want to use to see or hear media files.
The better solution is to port every codec out there to Haiku’s media kit plugin architecture, then developers can write as many media players as they want and all of them can take advantage of the media kit’s codec support without the user worrying about which players support which codecs.
Yeah I completely agree with umccullough. If it is going to take YEARS to port VLC and all of its dependencies I say don’t waste the time and just focus on the Haiku Media Kit and MediaPlayer. That way other applications can benefit from Media Kit improvements, like the web browser as umccullough says. Or our future Flash interpreter. Or a nice media center application. Or BePodder or other podcast or RSS software. I think you get the point.
I’ve never been a big fan of VLC, but I do love mplayer on Linux and Media Player Classic on Windows. I see the appeal of having something you are familiar with on Haiku. But we need to look at the bigger picture and be sure our precious developer time is spent wisely. And right now for multimedia the best use of developer time is working on the Media Kit.
VLC 1.0.4 under Haiku:
Haiku r35331 GCC2hybrid, VLC compiled with GCC4. We have SDL output, and Qt GUI.
Some screenshoots:
Enabled modules:
a52tospdif access_mmap adjust alphamask aout_file aout_sdl audio_format audioscrobbler avcodec avformat bandlimited_resampler blend blendbench bluescreen canvas chain clone cmml colorthres converter_float crop croppadd deinterlace dolby_surround_decoder dtstospdif dynamicoverlay equalizer erase extract fake float32_mixer folder gaussianblur gestures gradient grain headphone_channel_mixer hotkeys http i420_rgb_mmx i420_ymga i420_ymga_mmx i420_yuy2 i420_yuy2_mmx i422_i420 i422_yuy2 i422_yuy2_mmx invert libmpeg2 linear_resampler logo magnify marq memcpy3dn memcpymmx memcpymmxext mod mosaic motion motionblur motiondetect mpgatofixed32 mux_ogg noise normvol ogg opengl opengl osd_parser osdmenu param_eq png podcast psychedelic puzzle qt4 rc remoteosd ripple rotate rss rv32 sap scale scaletempo scene screensaver sdl_image sharpen shout showintf signals simple_channel_mixer spatializer spdif_mixer stream_out_raop telnet telx transform unzip visual vmem vorbis vout_sdl wall wave xml yuv yuvp
“some” time ago, Ruwen Boehm ported the VLC and MPlayer multimedia players to Syllable Desktop (which has many affinity with Haiku), so this may help: http://syllable.q52.eu/software/ruwen2/
I need an alpha tester, the port is only an preview build for testing purposes, there is a big chance it will not work for You, sorry.
The requiments:
- intelligence
- Haiku GCC2Hybrid
- Latest Qt (r110)
Pm to me.
Bump!! we need an updated VLC! any news anyone ?