Complete Flutter VLC Player Rewrite - co-authroed with @alr2413

[mitchross]

#158

@alr2413 and I have been hard at work past few months rewriting VLC plugin from scratch to support plugin v2. See https://medium.com/flutter/modern-flutter-plugin-development-4c3ee015cf5a

Here we have done a few things.

1. Leverages V2 Android Flutter Plugin design pattern.
2. All VLC features enabled.
3. Flutter Platform Interface to support any platform. The platform interface allows for platform specific implementation, ie web, desktop, linux, ios, android. Currently only iOS and Android are supported.
4. Flutter Pigeon for type safe method calls. No more string matching on method calls! (https://pub.dev/packages/pigeon)

Couple things.

We started a brand new repo for the work. It can be found here -> https://github.com/alr2413/flt_vlc_player/tree/master/flutter_vlc_player

This PR forks from Solid Software, incorporates @alr2413 code from their Repo and packages it into one singular PR commit.

Testing

1. If you switch to this branch/pull. You need to goto example folder inside flutter_vlc_folder , delete ios and android folder. Then Inside example run "flutter create . ", The git switch over is causing flutter a hard time in example to run it. Idk why.

[solid-software]

Great! Thank you!

Could you please restore funding.yaml and do some cleanup (remove deprecated/commented out files)? Also we seem to have lost some changelog versions and maybe some other changes we added while you were working on this?

Thanks for your awesome work!

[mitchross]

Unable to run example app on iOS device:

$ pwd
/Users/yuriiprykhodko/IdeaProjects/flutter_vlc_player/flutter_vlc_player/example

$ flutter pub get
Running "flutter pub get" in example...                             0.5s

$ flutter run
Launching lib/main.dart on iPhone in debug mode...
Expected ios/Runner.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj but this file is missing.
No application found for TargetPlatform.ios.
Is your project missing an ios/Runner/Info.plist?
Consider running "flutter create ." to create one.

Try this....

I cannot figure out why its doing this. The gitignore may be wrong...

(base) mitchross@MacBook-Pro example % ls
README.md	build		flutter_02.log	pubspec.lock
android		example.iml	ios		pubspec.yaml
assets		flutter_01.log	lib		test
(base) mitchross@MacBook-Pro example % pwd
/Users/mitchross/Documents/Programming/flutter/flutter_vlc_player/flutter_vlc_player/example
(base) mitchross@MacBook-Pro example % rm -rf ios
(base) mitchross@MacBook-Pro example % flutter create .
Recreating project ....

Then in your git tool of choice discard all of the changes besides the xcworkspace changes. If you keep the files after the create it will fail.

Discard these

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

Yeah, git clean and rm -rf ios did the trick, thanks!

[mitchross]

@solid-software @solid-pavloprykhodko its ready for merge now. cc @alr2413

[mitchross]

@solid-software .. cc @alr2413 Its come to our attention that this change cannot be published right away without some changes. If you try to manually point a new flutter project at this branch and do a flutter pub get, it will error out saying no pubspec was found. This is because the root folder name and the library folder name are the same.

There is a fix, we can take the contents of 'flutter_vlc_player' and move them to the root of the project. This will mostly work however there is one issue. You cant publish a package with path dependencies. Ie

 
   flutter_vlc_player_platform_interface:
          path: flutter_vlc_platform_interface

Instead we need

flutter_vlc_player_platform_interface: ^1.0.0

However, we cant test this locally right now because flutter_vlc_player_platform_interface is not published yet.

See -> https://dart.dev/tools/pub/dependencies

Path dependencies are useful for local development, but do not work when sharing code with the outside world—not everyone can get to your file system. Because of this, you cannot upload a package to the pub.dev site if it has any path dependencies in its pubspec.

Refs -
https://github.com/flutter/plugins/blob/master/packages/video_player/video_player/pubspec.yaml
https://github.com/flutter/plugins/blob/master/packages/video_player/video_player_platform_interface/pubspec.yaml

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

Let's split out the commands as codeblocks - they're easier to read and copy that way. Example below:

1. Clean the repo:

git clean

2. Delete existing ios folder from root of flutter project. If you have some custom changes made to the iOS app - rename it or copy somewhere outside the project.
3. Re-create the iOS app:

flutter create -i swift .

Make sure to update the project according to warnings shown by the flutter tools. (Update Info.plist, Podfile).
If you have some changes made to the iOS app, recreate the app using above method and copy in the changed files.

[mitchross]

fixed

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

I'm not sure we need an API description in the README. Let's remove this section.

[mitchross]

fixed

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

Could you please add a minimal example here?

[mitchross]

Added!

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

The player UI becomes unresponsive when it finishes playing. The Dart code seems to come through OK, controller.play gets dispatched. The problem is probably in the platform implementations. The bug shows on both Android and iOS.

[mitchross]

The player UI becomes unresponsive when it finishes playing. The Dart code seems to come through OK, controller.play gets dispatched. The problem is probably in the platform implementations. The bug shows on both Android and iOS.

I have fixed this and pushed. We can discuss if this is not best approach, but is working on both platforms now :) ... cc @alr2413

[mitchross]

The player UI becomes unresponsive when it finishes playing. The Dart code seems to come through OK, controller.play gets dispatched. The problem is probably in the platform implementations. The bug shows on both Android and iOS.

I have fixed this and pushed. We can discuss if this is not best approach, but is working on both platforms now :) ... cc @alr2413

Update 1pm 1/19/2021. Fully resolved.

[yu-pri]

LGTM!
Once again, great work!

[solid-yuriiprykhodko]

Sorry, wrong account. LGTM!

[alr2413]

Ping @solid-software,

The PR is already merged, but it's not released & not published in "pub.dev" repo.
Is there any issue?

[solid-software]

Pong @alr2413 :)

No issues, we would probably want to merge other PRs as well before releasing the plugin:

#162
#161

Thanks again for your contribution!