I've been looking at MobileVLCKit for some time actually, including submitting build script patches to make it easier to build as a framework and getting help from the VLC devs to make a stripped-down build option without the default proprietary codecs. There are a few key things that have led me to prefer going a separate way: * Build reproducibility is bad. I very frequently encounter breakage after a fresh checkout, as the complex build system doesn't ensure that consistent versions of all the dependencies are used -- for instance there are a lot of patches which frequently fail to apply. If the code can't be safely rebuilt and dropped in, upgrading and debugging are potential nightmares. * No Xcode-friendly packaging. The recursive autoconf-based build system doesn't match up well with CocoaPods for packaging and building in Xcode with desired options. I could make a podspec that uses a prebuilt binary with specific options[1], but: * MobileVLCKit is large, and includes lots of things we don't need. A default framework build is literally hundreds of megabytes; the actual linked executable size is smaller but it still adds like 40 megabytes to the app bundle. Even with the no-scary-codecs option there's a lot of stuff in there and you get a huge library. We could work further to strip it down, but there may be diminishing returns. OGVKit wraps mostly the same open-source codec libraries that MobileVLCKit does, but the framework and playback logic is lighter-weight and the packaging is friendlier to debugging and versioning. Ultimately the API surface between the Wikipedia app and the player widget will be quite small; it should be easy to swap player libraries should the need arise. (Or replace it altogether with standard classes if we ever allow MP4 output on the servers...!) [1] Note I am using such a binary package for libvpx, the WebM VP8/VP9 video codec. I'm prebuilding that using libvpx's build scripts, which *are* nice and clean and consistent, and the resulting multi-arch framework binary is only a few megabytes. -- brion On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 3:46 PM, Corey Floyd <cfloyd(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: