While working on the new DirectShow-based player, I took the opportunity to revise the way that players handle their native views. This has allowed us to create two different player implementations on Mac – one based on QuickTime (QTKit) and another based on AVFoundation while keeping the code for both implementations separate. To get around this a new version of the LiveCode player object has been created that doesn’t directly call the underlying system calls that are specific to one implementation or another – instead the implementing code is accessed through the MCPlatformPlayer abstraction which hides the details of loading video/audio files, accessing information about the loaded files, and controlling playback. This means for a time we had to support both.
When porting the engine to run on 64-bit Mac it was necessary to use Apple’s new AVFoundation media playback library, as the old QuickTime APIs are only available on 32-bit Macs. Thankfully there had already been a bit of work done towards replacing our old media player with something more modular and easy to work with. The new video player is based on DS, using external code provided by Docas AG We decided to overhaul the Windows player object, replacing the existing Quicktime based implementation with one based on DirectShow, which is fully supported on all current Windows versions. Happily, we have just done that, and the solution is available to you in the latest LiveCode release.
Clearly it is now necessary to remove our reliance on Quicktime and move to a modern implementation of the player object.
There is fallback support to use the old Windows MCI system, however this has been around since the days of Windows 3.1 and is no longer supported by Microsoft. How does this affect LiveCode and our users? Our media player object has been based on QuickTime, on Windows and Mac. This is also the recommendation of US-CERT, the US government’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Consequently they recommend Uninstalling QuickTime for Windows as soon as possible. A recent blog post from computer security firm Trend Micro announced that they had found 2 potential security vulnerabilities in QuickTime for Windows, and that a fix for those issues would not be forthcoming as Apple have withdrawn support for the Windows version of QuickTime.
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