Flutter VLC Player

[mitchross]

I worked heavily on https://github.com/solid-software/flutter_vlc_player

Theres a concept of https://docs.flutter.dev/development/platform-integration/platform-channels

Which the flutter VLC player has https://github.com/solid-software/flutter_vlc_player/tree/master/flutter_vlc_player_platform_interface

Im curious if @alexmercerind has any suggestions or ideas how we can bend dart_vlc together with platform interfaces in flutter_vlc_player to allow for desktop support in flutter VLC player and vice versa allow android/ios on dart_vlc.

Still noodling here....

[alexmercerind]

Original comment by @alexmercerind at #157 (comment)

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@ mitchross

I worked heavily on https://github.com/solid-software/flutter_vlc_player

Hello @mitchross, thanks for joining the conversation. flutter_vlc_player looks nice. I recall @ mfkl from videoLAN linked that after I posted dart_vlc on Twitter. I honestly had no idea about existing libvlc project for Flutter, either way I wanted audio playback for desktop back then. Following @ mfkl's reply, I joined the Discord for libvlc & I'm pretty sure I've seen you & you've seen me there.

My work has always been specific for Windows/Linux (C++) & since there were no video playback available libraries (still not available either for Linux or Windows), I decided to work on this. From my observations, libvlc 3.0.0's video frame callbacks aren't really performant. There are some people complaining about CPU usage on Windows, I wonder how well it'd be running on Android.
Following the performance issue #184, I started working on flutter_native_view (currently just supporting Windows) because Flutter team couldn't make platform views work on Windows.

Current implementation of dart_vlc uses dart:ffi & package:ffi for communicating with libvlc & uses platform channel interface just for texture registration (which I will possibly remove if I start using flutter_native_view). And I fear mixing the two separate implementation (one based on platform interface i.e. flutter_vlc_player & another on ffi i.e. dart_vlc.

I'm not really able to spare much time for this project these days [see commit history] & I don't know if I will be able to contribute back to flutter_vlc_player as of now. On the other hand, I think there are many good alternatives available to libvlc (in terms of features, bundle-size or even performance) such as official winrt:: media playback APIs on Windows, ExoPlayer on Android, GStreamer on Linux etc. etc. This plugin (dart_vlc) is now just "restricted" to use libvlc because of it's name.

No fear to say, I wonder if people opened/upvoted this issue only because they didn't wanna write separate code for Android/iOS (using video_player or better_player which also allow caching, better performance, smaller bundle sizes, provide more features & use ExoPlayer). To me, using libvlc on Android is bit redundant (atleast just for playing media).
There are some really really fine OSS apps on just GitHub using dart_vlc. From my observations, they're using it just because there are no alternatives to dart_vlc. libvlc isn't really business friendly [LGPL/GPL] or good to bundle (#220). I wonder most projects will readily switch to something else once things are bit sorted out for desktop too.

Lastly, I really really appreciate you taking the initiative for the collaboration. I'm currently not really ready to drop my copyleft LGPL on this project. Still, feel free to depend upon dart_vlc as a pub.dev dependency in your project or projects.

@ zdabing

can you use libmpv make dart_mpv. In my opinion

I already have a private libmpv library used in Harmonoid. An early-POC & public version is available here under permissive MIT license: libmpv.dart. The version used in Harmonoid is not available under open-source license as of now (capable of YouTube support, tag parsing & video playback).

TL;DR

I'm not going to implement Android support in dart_vlc (atleast anytime soon), because I have no revenue out of this, boss shouting at me to do this or any paycheck for this & I'm tired while having other plugins to maintain too.
However, I'll be happy to review/improve any pull requests that one makes here for Android support.

Thanks.
I think I've been little too honest with the reply, regardless have a great day.