Cool VL Viewer forum

Well, I just noticed this week that the Gstreamer plugin got issues under Windows (or at least under Win11 24H2): the APR socket gets closed by the OS without any clue about what could be going wrong (no error message: the socket just goes poof !).

I improved the plugin logging, tried with older APR versions (but why would the new one work just fine with the other plugins then ?), I tried with a bunch of different Gstreamer installs (old, new versions, MSVC and MinGW builds too), to no avail.

It could be an issue with shared memory and newer MSVC runtimes (Gstreamer MSVC builds use the VS2019 runtimes too, while the viewer uses VS2022 runtimes and those have seen several updates in the past months), or yet another Win11-24H2-specific bug, or an issue with how hard I de-bloat my Windows installs... I simply lack time (and motivation, not being a Windows user) to investigate further.

So, instead, I decided to provide a VLC plugin for Windows builds alone, since this plugin does not have such an issue. The drawback is that the VLC DLLs must be shipped together with the viewer, making the viewer installer and installed directory much larger (and duplicating the VLC libraries in case of parallel installations of the viewer on the same system, e.g when you want to keep an old version along the latest one), but on the other hand, nowadays, limited disk space and network download bandwidth are not the acute problems they used to be when the media plugins were first introduced in the viewer... Another drawback is that VLC does not always capture the playing media title and artist metadata (it requires a very specific metadata format to get them, when Gstreamer catches any format). One benefit is however that it simplifies the very first viewer installation under Windows (no need to install Gstreamer any more).

So, starting from tomorrow's release, Windows builds will provide a VLC plugin (activated by default), but you will still be able to configure the viewer to use the Gstreamer plugin, in case it still works fine for you...

Linux and macOS are unaffected by this change (they can still enjoy the superior Gstreamer plugin).