View Full Version : Quicktime backend
SneakerElph
2008-10-03, 02:32
On OS X this is most feasible, and possibly Windows. Linux gets left out of the loop, but what if built a Quicktime backend for XBMC? Not as a general purpose player, but for those DRM'd things that people always download from the iTunes store. Music, movies, etc. Just detect if they're protected and open them with Quicktime. I think Quicktime also offloads a lot of processing on the GPU (I could be wrong about this though), being faster.
Maybe there's licensing issues with this, as I'm sure you have thought about it. But it's just something that occurred to me when trying to decide the best way to go about getting TV automatically downloaded to my computer (iTunes has an excellent - and legal - Season Pass feature for downloading HD television shows.)
jmarshall
2008-10-03, 02:44
Two reasons. Mainly because it wouldn't be well integrated. Unless Quicktime is happy to feed us decoded digital audio and video (unlikely for a DRM'd item?) it would be hard to get it to seamlessly integrate with the application. The second is simply that we don't particularly want to support DRM at all, from a philosophical point of view. An addon isn't out of the question, though obviously licensing issues is something that would have to be well thought about.
This doesn't stop anyone from doing it, ofcourse. Any and all hacking on XBMC is most welcome at all times. :)
Cheers,
Jonathan
SneakerElph
2008-10-03, 04:05
I'm pretty sure there are quite a few mac applications that use Quicktime for video and/or audio and they're well integrated. I think it's in the Mac SDK. It probably wouldn't feed raw video to XBMC, but you could be like "Hey quicktime, play this file fullscreen plz" from a programming point of view.
I'm no programmer, so i could be completely wrong. I understand the philosophical opposition to DRM. Nobody likes it, or what it stands for.
I'm pretty sure there are quite a few mac applications that use Quicktime for video and/or audio and they're well integrated. I think it's in the Mac SDK. It probably wouldn't feed raw video to XBMC, but you could be like "Hey quicktime, play this file fullscreen plz" from a programming point of view.
I'm no programmer, so i could be completely wrong. I understand the philosophical opposition to DRM. Nobody likes it, or what it stands for.
As far I know, there are no App aside from Apple apps that can assess DRM video content. Just can't get there. Non-DRM video content does play using the Quicktime API.
SneakerElph
2008-10-03, 04:52
Ah, I see. Carry on :-)
The Quicktime API (QTKit) does allow allow playing back DRMed audio as long as the machine is authorized to play said content. However the playback is done by completely handing off the decoding and playback to an external component. AFAIK, interaction with the QT component is quite restricted, things like visualization data etc is not available. The same can be achieved by simply sending iTunes some Applescript commands.
The Quicktime API however does not allow playing back DRM video content.
SneakerElph
2008-10-03, 07:40
Too bad. I'd gladly pay for an HD season pass to The Office or House if it wasn't DRMed.
This is DRM losing money for the companies. Tsk, tsk.