support for Catalyst Framework (iOS Apps on macOS)

[ssbmaccom]

Are there any plans/schedules to provide libvlc and MobileVLCKit based upon it to support Catalyst Framework, which introduces a "UIKitForMac" build configuration?

I think many iOS apps using libVLC/VLCKit on iOS would like to welcome this effort. I could try to help even I am not that familiar with the details of the build system.

[fkuehne]

I’m not entirely sure what you request or need here. VLCKit is available for the Mac since 2008 with the exact same API as on iOS except for a single method which either returns a NSImage or a UIImage.

[ssbmaccom]

Catalyst Framework is basically a port of UIKit to macOS, so you mostly can port an App from iOS to macOS without replacing all the stuff to AppKit. Catalyst framework obviously is linking against different frameworks.

Thus VLCKit for macOS is rejected when building an iOS project for macOS, which you can (in theory) simply achieve by enabling a flag in Xcode.

It would be required to build VLCKit for iOS against Catalyst framework to run on macOS with UIKit. So far I don't know (and it is not well documented) which settings are required to do this on command line. I try to figure out - for sure you need to switch the SDK accordingly, but not sure if this moves from the build script for VLCKit to building libVLC underneath that.

[fkuehne]

We have that more or less working. The problem is that UIKit on Mac does not support OpenGL and this is currently the only way VLC can output video. There is no way to use Metal at the moment, so you could use VLCKit for audio-only playback right now.

[ssbmaccom]

Just bringing it up again...

Any progress?
Anything I can already test inside VLCKit?
Anything else I can do to support libVLC moving to Metal?

Otherwise I am quite sure, that sooner or later VLC will die on Apple platforms and my App will as well (except I move away from VLCKit - which I prefer not to do...)

[fkuehne]

So far, there is no progress on a potential metal based video output. Of course, eventually, we will do it but external contributions would also be welcome.