[Fwd: porting the RealPlayer]

[Alexander Leidinger]

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...

>> 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?

>> -------- 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".

On a somewhat related topic, which FreeBSD build platforms are  
targeted? 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, -current, i386, amd64, sparc64, ...?

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.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Mulder: Modell psyched the guy out. He put the whammy on him.
Scully: Please explain to me the scientific nature of the
	'whammy'.

	"The X-Files: Pusher"

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137