The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Good: I finally ordered a Mac mini this morning. The Apple store has several refurb models available, so I picked up the 1.42 GHz one with Bluetooth and Airport Extreme, and an 80 GB hard drive for $529. Not too shabby! I also picked up a 1GB module from OWC for $112. Kiss my face!
The Bad: Peter Jennings?!? Wow, that one caught me off guard.
The Ugly: DirectShow - formerly known as ActiveMovie and coincidentally (to Apple nuts at least) known as Quartz during development. I spent some time Friday and this weekend writing a DirectShow wrapper that sits on top of QuickTime. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 uses DirectShow on the PC to, essentially, play WMA files as background music. It's an ugly, horrible API that really captures the worst sides of the COM interface, along with inscrutable names like "FilterGraph", "GraphManager", "Pins" and the like. The amount of code you have to write just to open and play a movie or audio file is staggering. Anyway, we won't support WMA files on the Mac, but RCT3 will support AAC-encoded music files and custom content that you buy from the iTunes music store (along with more traditional music file formats). I think we'll get the better end of the deal. :-)
Comments
Wouldn't you be able to use the iTunes mechanism to convert WMA to MP3/AAC should the user try to download/install some WMA music for the app?
Nice find on the Mac mini, btw
Posted by: Brandon | August 8, 2005 03:35 PM
OI! You never told me you were working on RCT3!@
Posted by: Richard Bannister | August 8, 2005 07:23 PM
"Wouldn't you be able to use the iTunes mechanism to convert WMA to MP3/AAC should the user try to download/install some WMA music for the app?"
No - iTunes on the Mac (more generally, QuickTime) has no built-in support for Windows Media files.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | August 12, 2005 04:13 PM