Thought I should follow up on yesterdays post about Windows and MacOS X with some more information. The work is done in collaboration with the great guys behind the SongBird
music player. Those who don’t know Songbird its a very cool cross platform Music player built using XUL, the same GUI toolkit used to make Firefox. The idea is that by making sure GStreamer runs perfectly on Windows and MacOSX in addition to Linux/Unix they can use GStreamer as their backend across all platforms. The Songbird guys are doing some very cool things around web integration of their music player so I recommend everyone to take a look at their onsite demo.

Anyway to show of where we are at here is a screenshot. The screenshot shows our small proof of concept Windows mediaplayer playing a video under Windows. For a more full featured experience look to future versions of Songbird.

You can download binaries for Windows including the little sample player here on this site maintained by Sebastian Moutte who is our resident Windows porting expert.

We are a little shorter along on the Mac side of things as the Mac videosink is currently leaking memory like crazy and screenshots of audio playback tend to be a bit less interesting :). We expect squish those leaks and polish it up further in the next few weeks so I can provide a nice screenshot of GStreamer on MacOS X too.

We are implementing the GStreamer XOverlay interface accross all these video sinks. That means that you should be able to write a video player without any kind of special casing across platforms for video and audio output, GStreamer’s output autodetection should take care of it for you. So for Songbird it will let them write the code embedding the video window once and it will work using native video output on both Windows and MacOSX in addition to under X Windows of course. When these elements are 100% finished and polished up I think porting things like Totem or Pitivi to Windows and MacOSX should be quite trivial in theory with both GTK+ and GStreamer running natively on these platforms. That said practice tend to prove that there would be some work involved :)

It should also be mentioned that thanks to Songbird we are not only able to provide these elements to the community, but they will be fully documented and polished up. This means the Windows and MacOS X output support will be 100% solid and not just ‘checkbox’ level.