Am Sunday 20 February 2005 02:10 schrieb Russell Penney:
>
> Now one of my biggest concerns is that we should try to develop
> EVERYTHING in Squeak with as few plugins as possible. I wrote the
> OGG decoder in "pure" Smalltalk so it is possible. Of course by
> converting a small part of the decoder to a plugin I sped
> everything up 10 fold but that came later ;)
>
> I think this is important to remove platform dependencies or
> dependencies on external libraries. We may end up using them purely
> for performance but I think we should have a goal of not using them
> in the first part.

I don't share your point of view here. Writing codecs in pure 
smalltalk is interesting and may teach you a lot. But I don't think 
we have the manpower to do this. I want to have support for mpeg2, 
mpeg4 (xvid, divx), theora, etc, and windows people may want to use 
the microsoft codecs. Do you want to implement all this again - if it 
were possible at all. And I think the speed of a codec is very 
important. Every cpu cycle counts.

I would like to have small Class for each codec that uses the 
FFIPlugin as interface to the external library. This way everybody 
with a basic knowledge of his favourite codecs API could integrate it 
integrate it in no time.

We should concentrate on the container stuff and nice guis to 
manipulate the basic multimeda entities. This is work enough for the 
next month.

Martin