[Development] The dark side of QtMultimedia

[Gianluca]

Il giorno 17/nov/2014, alle ore 01:48, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> ha scritto:

> On Monday 17 November 2014 00:34:48 Nichols Andy wrote:
>> This is a bit of a side issue from the topic at hand, but I am the correct
>> person to answer this question so I will.  Regarding VideoOutput on iOS
>> there is currently a serious limitation that we have been unable to over
>> come.  If you are using the QWidget based API on iOS (and you probably
>> shouldn’t be) then everything should work fine.  That is because it is easy
>> to embed “native” controls in QWidget hierarchies, and thats what we do for
>> QtMultimedia video output (overlay a AVPlayerLayer where the video output
>> should go).  However when we would like to render video in a Qt Quick 2
>> scene then we need to be able to render the video to a texture.  On OS X it
>> is possible to render video to a OpenGL texture from a hidden AVPlayerLayer
>> window, and then render that in the Qt Quick 2 scene, but that API is not
>> available on iOS.  There is AFAIK currently no high-level API to render
>> video from an AVPlayer to an OpenGL texture on iOS.  The work around to
>> provide any video at all in Qt Quick 2 is to to instead render to a
>> “Window” control which instead falls back to the overlaying the native
>> video window surface on top of the QQuickWindow.  Yes it is less than
>> ideal, but we are not the only framework with this limitation.
> 
> Why do you want to render video non-fullscreen anyway on a device with a small 
> screen? Once the user clicks the play button, go to full screen with rotation 
> support.

I don’t want to play in non-fullscreen, I typically play in full-screen. But the transition between full-screen video and QML side it’s very strange. I posted on the forum and someone told me that it’s a know limitations. But maybe he was wrong.
The problem is that when you change the visible property of VideoOutput on iOS you see on the screen something like a very fast flickering like it would be an animation moving out of the screen the video. This is very disturbing for a user.

And also, even when you play full-sreen a video, I want to put some overlay controls that appear and disappear on touch showing the play/pause button, the close button, the progress, the volume, etc. This is cannot possibile at the moment. (But this is less important that the ‘flickering’ problem).

Cheers,
Gianluca.