package:media_kit

[alexmercerind]

TL;DR

Please consider replacing package:dart_vlc with package:media_kit in your Flutter projects. It should require minimal changes.

package:media_kit brings major advancements. Few are:

• Support for all platforms i.e. Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, GNU/Linux & Web.
• Hardware acceleration i.e. GPU usage, allowing playback of multiple FHD, 4K & 8K videos.
• Support for both video & audio applications.
• Unit-tests.
• Smaller size.
• Built-in video controls.
• Improved API.
• Improved stability.
• Improved performance.
• Less restrictive license: MIT.

Contributions are welcomed to package:media_kit.

Let's have a reliable video & audio playback library for Flutter, which meets community's demand.

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Why

From a personal standpoint, working on package:dart_vlc has been a good learning experience. I started working on this project when I was around 18 years old. This helped me learn in detail about C/C++, low-level APIs (such as libVLC & Flutter platform channels), native interop, shared libraries etc. With that being said, I strongly believe that code-quality & stability has been highly compromised due to my lack of experience & knowledge at that time.

On the other hand, package:dart_vlc is very inefficient as it doesn't utilize GPU for video playback, causing excessive CPU usage & reduced battery life. There are other limitations in libVLC, which were becoming a blocker for the overall experience of decent video playback. Lastly, the bundle size is also very large.

Future

At the moment, I'm investing my time in the further development, advancement & maintenance of package:media_kit. In future, if the requirement of a video package that specifically uses libVLC is felt, I will consider reviving this project & re-write things from scratch.

For the note, VLC Media Player is an extremely good piece of software capable of playing most all multimedia files, I use it nearly everyday since my childhood. However, libVLC isn't exactly seeming like the perfect-fit here.

Thanks!