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2008-10-03, 01:32
On OS X this is most feasible, and possibly Windows. Linux gets left out of the loop, but what if built a Quicktime backend for XBMC? Not as a general purpose player, but for those DRM'd things that people always download from the iTunes store. Music, movies, etc. Just detect if they're protected and open them with Quicktime. I think Quicktime also offloads a lot of processing on the GPU (I could be wrong about this though), being faster.
Maybe there's licensing issues with this, as I'm sure you have thought about it. But it's just something that occurred to me when trying to decide the best way to go about getting TV automatically downloaded to my computer (iTunes has an excellent - and legal - Season Pass feature for downloading HD television shows.)
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I'm pretty sure there are quite a few mac applications that use Quicktime for video and/or audio and they're well integrated. I think it's in the Mac SDK. It probably wouldn't feed raw video to XBMC, but you could be like "Hey quicktime, play this file fullscreen plz" from a programming point of view.
I'm no programmer, so i could be completely wrong. I understand the philosophical opposition to DRM. Nobody likes it, or what it stands for.
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d4rk
Team-XBMC Developer
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The Quicktime API (QTKit) does allow allow playing back DRMed audio as long as the machine is authorized to play said content. However the playback is done by completely handing off the decoding and playback to an external component. AFAIK, interaction with the QT component is quite restricted, things like visualization data etc is not available. The same can be achieved by simply sending iTunes some Applescript commands.
The Quicktime API however does not allow playing back DRM video content.
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Too bad. I'd gladly pay for an HD season pass to The Office or House if it wasn't DRMed.
This is DRM losing money for the companies. Tsk, tsk.
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Drifty
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2010-01-20, 04:30
As the title suggests. Can you use the Quicktime X Player as an external player? Then you would get h.264 gpu acceleration. There must be some caveats to this because it does not seem to be a documented solution in these forums.
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I suspect this would be tricky at best. It'd also completely ruin the integration. If there is an external player available that can take a path as a commandline argument then it *might* be feasible. You're on your own with that, however.
As per all the external player stuff, however, it gives a really bad user experience.
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Drifty
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You can use the Media player classic HT player as an external player to obtain GPU acceleration on the windows platform. Could you not do the same thing on a Intel Mac Mini (Nvidia 9400M GPU) with 10.6 OSX using QTX as the external player? In my original post I was referring to this platform not the ATV. I think thats why I got merged with this one.
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Drifty
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OK thats great. Has anyone tried this? If I were to do this would I follow the same instructions in the wiki for the windows example?
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D-tyme
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Hmm...So if I go the Mac Mini route, I can then overcome the AC3 Passthrough issue a bunch of us are having, by calling Quicktime as the External player instead. This is promising...
I guess I hijacked this thread a bit.
