[Fwd: porting the RealPlayer]

[Ion-Mihai Tetcu]

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 08:06:44 +0200
Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> wrote:

> Quoting Ion-Mihai Tetcu <itetcu at people.tecnik93.com> (from Sun, 20
> Aug 2006 21:47:15 +0300):
> 
> > On Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:19:07 -0700
> > Matt Olander <Matt at iXsystems.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I met with a developer of the Real Player at Linux World. She says
> >> they would *love* to port a native version of the Real player to
> >> FreeBSD. Yay! She even showed me that they have an older FreeBSD
> >> dev environment set up and are ready to start to try compiling it
> >> for release after we get it up to date.
> >
> > Yay ! Good work :)
> 
> Now we just need to convince Adobe too...

Yeh.

> >> We need a couple of FreeBSD experts to assist with
> >> questions/expertise/feedback to make sure this gets finished ;-)
> >> Please send me your name/email off list and I'll reply to her with
> >> a shortlist of who can help them.
> >
> > Since it's great to volunteer others ;-) maybe netchild@ (cc'ed) has
> > time for this ?
> 
> I don't mind helping out, if time permits. But I'm curious, why did  
> you suggest me?

Hmm, let's see, you did work on sound and linux emulation :)
They have a linux product that uses sound and video :)

> >> -------- Original Message --------
> >
> >  [ ... ]
> >
> >> Also, we're currently only running nightly builds for the stable
> >> branch on FreeBSD.  Do you think we should be running the current
> >> branch as well?  That's where all the new functionality is going -
> >> like playlists and Windows Media (ahem.. if you have a license for
> >> it).  Depending on how long porting work takes, FreeBSD may want to
> >> just skip the currently released player and go for all the new
> >> technology.
> >
> > From our point of view it would be no problem to have both in the
> > Ports Tree (The second as -devel).
> 
> This assumes they are willing to offer beta versions for public  
> testing instead of only building it "for personal pleasure".

Yes, maybe we get lucky.
 
> On a somewhat related topic, which FreeBSD build platforms are  
> targeted? 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, -current, i386, amd64, sparc64, ...?

No reason to target 4.x and 5.x; IMO 6(-STABLE or the last _RELEASE),
eventually -CURRENT on i386 and amd64 would be enough.

> Regarding the architecture this is more out of curiosity on my side,  
> but for the FreeBSD versions I'm asking because we have a SoC
> student working on implementing parts of the new Open Sound System
> (OSS) API which may provide some benefits to realplayer. This code
> will first arrive in -current (the SoC is coming to an end, so I will
> commit this maybe next month... depending upon reviews and tests),
> but I could try to come up with a patch for 6.x as well. A list of
> new IOCTLs is at http://wiki.freebsd.org/RyanBeasley/ioctlref. With a
> patch for 6.x they could check at runtime if the IOCTLs are supported
> and use the new features if desired (= developing software for the
> features of tomorrow... ;-) ). I also want to MFC some stuff in the
> sound system (bug fixes and new drivers), so depending on their needs
> I should do that "soon" or at least provide patches to them.

And you ask why I thought of you ? :)


-- 
IOnut
Un^d^dregistered ;) FreeBSD "user"