The VideoLAN Forums

Are there any plans to produce a 64-bit version of VLC on the Mac (or a universal version that would include Intel-64)?

Yes, when X.6 will be out.

Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to build 64-bit Mac VLC from the source? We are using VLC as a part of a cross-platform application containing a streaming video server. The application is written in Java; VLC being 32-bit only means that we can't use Java 6 on the Mac (since it's 64-bit only.)

use llvm-gcc and compile it.

A 64-bit VLC would require a 64-bit SDL, which won't compile because SDL uses NSQuickDrawView. Apple doesn't supply this class at all for 64-bit, and plans to drop it entirely soon.

That said, I don't know if SDL can be done without, and I believe all of VLC's other Mac dependencies build 64-bit with no problem on the Mac.

No, VLC doesn't need SDL.

Well, while most external libraries support to be compiled in 64 bit mode (read closely, most do but far from all [1]), VLC for Mac itself is not. As Apple widely published this summer, the Carbon API won't be available to 64bit applications which basically means that essentials parts of VLC's audio and video outputs on the Mac (using some Carbon Audio codes and more importantly QuickDraw even in the OpenGL vouts) will not work as expected. Same for the actual GUI (for example, blocking screensavers while playing a movie won't be successful).

Thanks to generous sponsorship of one of our actively supporting companies, the VideoLAN is an ADC Select member and therefore able to access pre-releases of Mac OS X 10.6 for internal development and improvements. We are confident to release a 64bit version of VLC for the Mac by the time Snow Leopard will be published. For the meantime, we think about the release of a llvm-optimised version of VLC which brings quite some speed improvements without the 64bit memory stamp and the advantage to be able to use existing sources with little modification.

For more information on this matter, feel free to mail me off-forum (my nick -at- videolan -dot- org).


[1] Some exotic such as Goom2k4, but also more popular ones. Additionally, many libraries fail to detect 64bit compilers on the Mac correctly, so you have to adapt many build scripts manually. Still, certain libraries are currently only supported without ASM optimisations.

Many thanks for your detailed reply. Our module that uses VLC is on the server side, so I guess we'll just try running VLC in a separate process and controlling it through telnet or rc interface - sounds easier than doing the 64-bit compilation at this point.