VLC for the new Windows 8 User Experience ("Metro")

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1061646928/vlc-for-the-new-windows-8-user-experience-metro/posts/366106?ref=email&show_token=dd67c6b0e2aa990e

by PaulHoule • 14 years ago

77 29 14 years ago

kickstarter.com

dkersten• 14 years ago

Not really on topic, but am I the only person who finds metro to be really really REAllY ugly?

untog• 14 years ago

Yes it is off topic, and no you aren't. There have been lengthy, lengthy discussions between members of HN of whether Metro is a good or bad thing. I think at this point we probably all have to agree to disagree.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

An analysis of Metro http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

ishansharma• 14 years ago

I am one. The thing with Metro is that it's just too much clutter on big screens and strange colour choices by Microsoft. Out of 15 or so options in Windows 8, there is exactly 1 that looks good!

And the jumping between Metro and Desktop environment is just too hectic!

TommyDANGerous• 14 years ago

VLC is amazing, I will always be down to donate to them.

ComputerGuru2• 14 years ago

I'm all for funding 40k pounds (~65k USD) for VLC (they deserve it), but 40k under the guise of Metro seems a bit much, no?

jbk5• 14 years ago

Well, no, this is not too much.

This is an excellent question.

Designing a UI above VLC for Metro is quite easy, and we've already done some proof of concept. Finding a designer would be simple and 1k$ for the project would be too much already :) It would take a couple of months and be done with it.

The issue is to get on the store. And this is hard.

Why is that?

VLC (and its underlying libraries, including codecs, networking and demuxers) represents around 7M LoC of C, C++ and ASM. All of this is very C99 code and inline ASM. Visual Studio cannot eat that in any way. Believe me, we tried. A lot. So we need to compile the VLC for Windows on Linux, using gcc+mingw.

Unfortunately, this does not work on WinRT ("Modern UI" or whatever you like to call it). WinRT restricts a lot the Win32 APIs. And only Visual Studio knows which ones. Oh, and the BSD sockets are gone...

So, we need to change and update the toolchain, fix MingW for WinRT, rewrite the code that is using Win32 APIs since 10 years (and in all underlying libraries too...), write a new UI above this, fix the code using HWND for rendering, port the audio and video outputs, work-around the sandbox for DVD playback, probably write a WinSock2 replacement library to build all the cross-platform libraries that expect a BSD-socket-like library, etc...

Add to that the need to modify MingW to output dlls that we can load on ARM (Windows RT) and fix all the same different APIs for WP8.

Of course a lot of the work is not really on VLC, but on being able to compile for WinRT with open source tools, and a lot will be re-usable.

So, yes, we will need quite a few developers, and therefore money.

Todd3• 14 years ago

It sounds like it's going to be a real challenge, then. Much of the restriction around API usage is related to IO and other things that can block for more than about 50ms. As you know, the APIs that are allowable have been converted to be asynchronous, or have been replaced entirely with an async equivalent (more or less). This will make it difficult to just link with a gcc lib unless it's been purged of these references. In addition, there are no database APIs, for example. So it's really a crap shoot about how much difficulty a given project will take to port.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Wow. Sounds like anyone who's ever made Windows software and wants to port it to Windows 8 store is going to have to go through a lot of pain.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Do you think VLC will be the better for it?

zobzu3• 14 years ago

Personally I feel like the 40K GBP should go to all the devs of VLC combined. Porting to metro is only a small part of VLC itself, and is not worth 40K GBP.

What makes it worth that money, and that people will pay for it, is that VLC is the hard work of all the _previous_ developers.

So while I'm all for giving people money to make an open source project advance, I feel a little wrong about this very one.

i386• 14 years ago

What? then have no VLC for metro because they gave the kitty away and had no work done at all? Defeats the purpose don't you think?

jbk5• 14 years ago

You totally miss the point. The point is to speed up the development for Metro.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848569

Torn• 14 years ago

I've been using VLC for years... time to contribute back.

Cheers guys

CrLf• 14 years ago

You know what I would like to contribute for? To bring the old Mac interface back.

(BTW, I already contributed to VLC in the past. It's very useful and I think they deserve it.)

jbk5• 14 years ago

You can have the old interface back with a few clicks...

feepk• 14 years ago

I'd like to invite you to have a look at my blog post detailing on how to customize the new Mac UI to suit your needs:

http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac

If this isn't enough for me, create requests on https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ so we can see what we can do!

VLC for the new Windows 8 User Experience ("Metro")

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