Multimedia on Mac OS – A quick progress update

Things are running smoothly regarding the update of the player object. In this post I will briefly describe what has been done so far.

The first step was the refactoring of the MCPlayer related code. Formerly, the MCPlayer class used ifdefs in most functions, based on whether it was using the ‘platform player’, ‘quicktime’, or was on Linux. Now, MCPlayer is split into two classes in separate files (player-legacy.cpp/.h and player-platform.cpp/.h). The former is the pre-platform API version; the latter the platform API version. This made it easier to update the platform-player version to use its own controller.

The next step was to implement a custom controller bar. For the reasons described in the previous blog post for Multimedia on Mac OS, we had to implement our own controller. After some discussion, and some research on the appearance of modern video controllers, we are almost there! Below is a preview of the current, and probably final version.

Because some users may not like this color, we thought it is better to make it customisable. So we added some properties to the player object. In fact, we tied in some existing properties that were not used for the player object. For example, the hiliteColor. For the player object, the hiliteColor is the color of the played area, as well as the color of the volume area in the volume popup window. It is also the color of a button background when this button is clicked. So, if you don’t like the purple color that is set by default, all you have to do is add a new button (or just type in the message box) with the following code:

on mouseUp

set the hiliteColor of player 1 to red 

end mouseUp 

The result is the following:

In the player object, you can also set the foreColor, which is the color of the selected area, i.e. the color of the area between the selection handles. This is dark grey by default.

Modify the code in your button, to change both the hiliteColor and the foreColor: 

on mouseUp

set the hiliteColor of player 1 to “127,255,0″

set the foreColor of player 1 to “106,156,56”

end mouseUp

The result is the following:

Finally, we had to move from Quicktime/QTKit to AVFoundation. This transition is now done, and the new player object seems to work perfectly with the AVFoundation APIs. Some tweaks have still to be done, in order to ensure similar (or at least as similar as possible) behaviour with the old Quicktime/QTKit controller. Next, and final step as far as the player object is concerned, is to test it thoroughly and fix any bugs that may arise.