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Could you be a bit more tangible about how video developers have have just made things more complex? I don't necessarily disagree, since I can't wrap my mine ar

• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I think Ralph (Levien) did a fine job of that in the original article, albeit primarily focused on the issues surrounding compositing. I wasn't talking about codecs, but about how software interacts with the hardware. We're already dealing with the move away from OpenGL, which for a while had looked as if it might actually finally wrap most video in a consistent, portable model. Metal and Vulkan are moderately consistent with each other, but less so with the existing OpenGL-inspired codebase(s). But there's even more simplistic levels than this: in audio, on every (desktop) platform, it is trivial for audio I/O to be tightly coupled to the hardware "refresh" cycle. WDM-WASAPI/CoreAudio/ALSA all make this easy, if you need it (and for low latency audio, you do). Doing this for graphics/video is an insanely complex task. I know of no major GUI toolkit that even exports the notion of sync-to-vblank let alone does so in any actually portable way (Qt and GTK have both made a few steps in this direction, but if you dive in deep, you find that its a fairly weak connection compared to the way things work in audio).