Snowtape and Flip4Mac
As some of you might know and quite painfully experienced lately, Snowtape has some difficulties running Windows Media streams. There are a number of crashes we just can’t seem to fix and there is this weird problem with the Windows Media connection dropping as soon as you start streaming to external speakers using AirPlay.
Snowtape is currently using a number of open-source libraries to stream Windows Media content. After investigating the issue for a couple of weeks we learned that most of the crashes are within these open-source libraries. The bad thing is that we can not fix these issues ourselves and we do not have enough information about the problems or the technology itself to contribute to these projects. That’s why we decided to completely replace our Windows Media technology and base it on technology that is known to be stable naming “Windows Media Components for QuickTime” a.k.a Flip4Mac. It looks very promising so far and it seems to solve all our problems, including the streaming problem with AirPlay and compatibility problems with some WMA streams.
Another big advantage of this technology is that we will be able to integrate support of other streaming technologies in the future, e.g. QuickTime RTSP or HTTP Streaming to only name two.
We are currently testing the implementation ourselves but we could use some help since we are not yet sure if everything works as expected. We prepared a public beta version for you if you like to help us test the technology.
Download 2.0.4b (707) Public Beta
In order to make Windows Media work you also need to install Flip4Mac which can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft website.
If you find any bugs, please let us know.
October 16th, 2010 • Permalink
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