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As part of LiveCode Global Jam I have been focusing on testing the player in 6.7 and have reported a few bugs that I have found so far. I really support the move to AVFoundation as a part of the move to Cocoa and I hope that the new player will be able to have feature parity with the current player. However I suspect there will be features that will not be able to be implemented in AVFoundation. I asked during Kevin's 'ask me anything' session yesterday if it was possible to have the option of using the old player in 6.7 as a backward compatibility mode. Kevin's answer gave hope that it will likely be considered if feature parity can't be achieved.

So I think it is important to torture test the player and the new controller that Panos is working on to see if true feature parity is achieved. I have uploaded a stack to one of my bug reports (http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12512) that I am using to test various messages and properties. I have not got all the properties and messages on there yet. If people want to download it add to it that would be great. Also If people can try it on their own Macs to test on various OS's and hardware. One thing I have noticed is some of the bugs I have found happen only on Retina Macs. So it would be good to get this tested on as many OS and Hardware configurations as possible.

Torture testing the player will help the team work toward the goal of achieving feature parity, if that is not possible in the end, the unresolved bug reports will help make the case that the backward compatibility mode with an old version of player will be needed in 6.7.

Thanks.

Martin Koob

I have done more testing and found more bugs in the Player in LC 6.7 DP4.
-Resize Player by dragging does not work property
-Hiding player controller stretches movie image vertically
-Setting playRate of player has no effect on playRate
-setting player alwaysBuffer to true results in black image
Other player bugs that I found but that was already reported.
- The player hasn't show after hidden.

I have made a stack that I used to test Quicktime parameters and messages. I have uploaded it here.
I am sure there are more tests that can be added so if you think of any please modify the stack and upload it here.
My tests were done on a MacBook Pro Retina running Mac OS X 10.8.5.
If others could test it on other configurations that would be great.

Martin Koob

Hi Martin,
I tested using Win 7 and liveCode 7 dp5
I really wanted to reproduce some of your 5 listed errors but couldn't.
All 5 passed in LC 7 dp5 (maybe you already knew they would).
Went through the rest of the functions but they all seemed to behave normally.

Simon

Hi Simon

I believe these bugs are Mac specific due to the project underway to replace all the Multimedial functionality in Mac OS X http://livecode.com/blog/2014/05/15/mul ... -on-macos/
I don't think it would affect windows at this point but as the initiative to update multimedia across all platforms continues this stack could be a way to test the player to ensure that all features of the player work consistently. Again as I said I don't think I have all the properties and messages implemented there yet so it is a work in progress.

Martin

Hi Martin,
I've suddenly gone all sad again, I never thought to look up "AVFoundation" didn't realize it is Apple only.
When they said they were making a new multimedia player did they mean just for Apples? They seem to be spending a lot of time on integrating AVFoundation and I haven't heard anything on other platforms.

Simon
Win/Android orphan

Simon wrote:When they said they were making a new multimedia player did they mean just for Apples? They seem to be spending a lot of time on integrating AVFoundation and I haven't heard anything on other platforms.

I believe Ben addressed this in his Global Jam chat, but in short the current Mac revision is simply a proving ground for a set of refactoring that will then be applied for Windows and Linux as well. Of the three Linux us the harder since the codecs involved are often proprietary and therefore rarely pre-installed. Windows, however, should be straightforward.

If you didn't see Ben's talk he covers a lot of other interesting details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkWlUyNGwBY