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Issue 12.2 ('Inefficiencies')
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FEATURE

Moving to AVFoundation

Leaving QuickTime behind

Issue: 12.2 (March/April 2014)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software Xojo/Real Studio Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 12,205
Starting Page Number: 43
Article Number: 12208
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

For more than 20 years QuickTime has been the technology people use on Mac (and Windows) to play and record audio and video. But QuickTime existed only for 32-bit and will not be ported to 64-bit. For Mac OS X, Apple introduced QTKit with Mac OS X 10.4 with QuickTime 7. Apple rewrote big parts to have native code independent of the old QuickTime framework and to run natively for 64-bit applications. For older codecs, there existed a bridge back into the 32-bit world with a proxy app.

Deprecation

Now we have Mac OS X 10.9 and Apple deprecated QuickTime and QTKit frameworks in favor of AVFoundation. In December 2013 Apple started to reject applications for the Mac App Store due to using deprecated API. At that point, all Mac OS X apps built with Xojo were rejected as the Xojo framework linked to Quicktime and QTKit frameworks. Quickly Xojo (and also Monkeybread Software) reduced dependencies on those frameworks to make the apps compliant to the app store rules.

Now the Xojo framework will move to use AVFoundation for a lot of features related to audio and video playback. Xojo 2013r4 already uses AVFoundation instead of the legacy Sound Manager framework for playing audio in cocoa applications. Further changes are coming in 2014 for the MoviePlayer class and the Movie class. But deprecated things like the EditableMovie class will probably go away at that point.

If you have existing projects using Movie editing functions in Xojo, you can keep them running with Xojo 2013 versions as 32-bit applications. But if some day you need to port your app to 64-bit, you will have to rewrite them. For Windows, Linux, and Mac applications needing video playback, it may be time to move to our MBS VLC Plugin and use the libraries behind the popular VLC application.

AVFoundation Plugin

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