Windows adventures

Once upon a time Stefan Brück built Minitube with Visual C++ and the DirectShow Phonon backend. Alas the DirectShow backend had problems streaming YouTube videos. Then came Marco di Antonio and built Minitube with the Mplayer backend, he did a great work but mplayer was incredibly unstable and crashed all the time. Weeks passed and still no Minitube for Windows.

I spent the last few nights setting up a virtualized Windows XP and trying to finally get a working Minitube on Windows. First of all, Windows sucks, as you may already know. By contrast Qt 4.6 is so awesome that it can build cleanly with Mingw, the Windows GCC port, and this gave me hope. The DirectShow Phonon Backend used to require Visual C++, fortunately this is no longer the case. So it is very easy to have Minitube use DirectShow. It has problems with YouTube video streams. Maybe they can be worked around but, even if that was the case, users would have to install codecs separately. I tried to install FFDShow, ffmpeg ported as DirectShow codecs, but miserably failed both on XP and Vista. I can barely imagine what would happen if I release Minitube that way. Thousands of angry Windows users, with zero respect and knowledge of what Free Software is, would flood with the comments, emails and negative reviews.

Plan B: the Phonon VLC Backend. Lucky enough KDE people are actively working on a VLC backend for Phonon. I spent a few days trying to compile it using their CMake-based build system. I may be an idiot, a Windows noob or a KDE noob or the three together, but I couldn’t build that DLL. So I decided to replace the build system altogether and use QMake. Ten minutes and I had my phonon_vlc.dll.

So does this mean Minitube for Windows is ready? No way. From what I can understand VLC has problems decoding the video stream, especially the AAC audio. It stops playing the video, not even randomly but always in the same place. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it skips to the next video. But in general VLC feels like the more solid solution. I’ll try to get in touch with VLC people and get help.

To be continued…