[MPlayer-dev-eng] Porting mplayer/ffmpeg to iPhone/iPod Touch

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Thursday 17 July 2008, Ergzay wrote:
> I have heard rumors that someone has been trying to port mplayer to
> jailbroken iPhones. Is there any internal progress on this? I think the
> biggest problem would have to be any assembly code that would need to
> be rewritten for the ARM processors. Is this at all possible without
> this turning into a very large project?

MPlayer and FFmpeg already have quite a good share of code optimized with ARM
assembly, you can see it if you look at the sources.

I have seen a number of reports trying to (unsuccessfully) build FFMpeg for
Apple hardware with all the ARM assembly optimizations enabled. Nobody was
qualified enough to at least provide a sane report with the summary of the
problems, let alone contribute some fixes or patches. My impression based on
this very scarce information (that's why it might be wrong) is that Apple has
forked a very legacy version of binutils and use it in their toolchain. This
introduces some syntax problems with the ARM assembly code from FFmpeg, which
was developed using relatively modern versions of binutils (2.15 and newer
AFAIK).

As I have no intention of getting iPhone myself, I can only present the
information about the current status and hope that some newcomer would be
interested in trying to fix it. Would you like to be the one?

And of course you can build MPlayer without assembly optimizations even now,
but the performance will not be very impressive.

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka