VLC for Mac : Death has been greatly exaggerated

A small precision has been made by the VideoLAN project in an effort to reassure users about the future of the VLC media player for Mac. With this explanation, the situation has become a whole lot clearer.

For VideoLAN, this isn’t an about face, but rather clarification that the previous incorrect release was caused by a bug in the projects communication channels, leading to the alarming news about the near death of the Macintosh VLC media player. The death of the player which was imminent was "greatly exaggerated", with it now being possible to read on the official forum.

VideoLAN concedes that they are suffering from a "lack of manpower" for the development of the Mac OS X version of the VLC media player, but only in relation to the current user interface based on the native Apple API : Cocoa. This interface represents 1% of the VLC code, with the VLC core being programmed in C, with most of the other plug-ins working perfectly. It is difficult though to understand how this 1% of the program led to the number of problems encountered with version 1.0 of VLC on the Mac, and the abandonment of their development of a 64 bit version.


You need to put Lunettes on to be able to understand
It has been decided that the current Cocoa graphical interface for the Mac VLC version will no longer be supported, with the reason provided for this abandonment being that the project has decided to develop a new interface, code named Lunettes, which will require a complete rewrite. Development of this is underway.

On a dedicated wiki, it is explained that VLC for Mac needs to attract designers so that the user interface can be easily customised, allowing Lunettes to operate via simple CSS. For Lunettes, the VLCKit framework will be used : "pure Cocoa". The old API will not be used as they posed too many problems for the 64 bit architecture.

Lunettes will therefore be 64 bit, allowing you to add a certain number of new functions like picking up a file from where you left of after previously closing VLC and browsing play lists and television channels in full screen mode.

The discretion surrounding Lunettes seems to be behind the downfall of VLC for Mac, even though the project hasn’t yet been officially approved.


Payback
VideoLAN appears to want to get even with Apple, accusing them of blocking VLC media player on the Mac operating system while "refusing to say why". The project also reminded everyone that only volunteers work on VLC, with all money taken from donations – about 10000 Euros a year, being used to purchase and operate hardware, servers and organise meetings...