QtMediaPlayer

A simple but powerful multimedia player library designed for Qt Quick.

Features

• Full-featured multimedia player
• Cross-platform: support Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms in theory
• Easy to build and use

Known limitations

Currently this library doesn't support reading from embeded resources or reading from QIODevice. It can only read from real local files or online streams.

Why not just use QtMultimedia or own FFmpeg implementation?

Currently this project uses MDK and MPV as the player backends. They are world-famous multimedia frameworks with long time active developing, they are known to have good code quality and especially outstanding performance, however, QtMultimedia is only a simple implementation based on the operating system's default multimedia framework, it has a friendly interface but it's not designed for performance, and I'm also not convinced that the Qt company has deep experience on the multimedia area. And I also don't think some custom FFmpeg implementation can be better than these impressive frameworks.

Build

Since this project makes heavy usage of Qt RHI, you'll need at least Qt 5.14 to use this project. It's recommended to use Qt 5.15 or Qt 6.2 or the latest version of Qt.

cmake .
cmake --build .
cmake --install .

Currently two player backends are available: MDK and MPV. FFmpeg is on plan. All backends will be loaded dynamically at run-time.

Notes for using the MDK backend: you need to download a separate FFmpeg package yourself and put them into the application directory due to MDK doesn't link against FFmpeg statically.

Notes for using the MPV backend: libmpv needs ANGLE (libEGL.dll & libGLESv2.dll) and Microsoft's shader compiler (d3dcompiler_XX.dll), you need to put them into the application directory. The latter is shipped with Windows SDK, the former is shipped with Google Chrome/Mozilla Firefox/Visual Studio Code/etc. If you want to build ANGLE yourself, vcpkg is a good choice.

About the VLC backend: There has been quite some work on the initial porting of the VLC backend, but it comes to an dead end. libVLC recommends to use a separate window to do the rendering to get the best performance and experience. It also supports get the decoded data and do the rendering ourself, but after some testing, I found there is significant performance lost, just like libVLC's official documentation said. And we want to use QtRHI to catch up Qt's latest design, however, libVLC's design is not suitable for doing so. It supports custom rendering through Direct3D and OpenGL, but it works quite differently with QtRHI's design. In one word: the VLC backend is abandoned due to significant performance lost and incompatible design with QtRHI.

Recommended 3rd-party pre-built FFmpeg binaries:

• RECOMMENDED avbuild (desktop & mobile & embeded platforms, full featured & lite builds, shared & static libraries, LGPL & GPL)
• FFmpeg-Builds (Win64 & Linux64, full featured builds, shared & static libraries, LGPL & GPL)
• Mile.FFmpeg (based on vcpkg, currently Windows only, full featured builds, shared libraries only, LGPL)

Usage

See example.

License

MIT License

Copyright (C) 2022 by wangwenx190 (Yuhang Zhao)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
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SOFTWARE.