However, we believe that concurrent, soft-realtime programming in Kotlin/Native shall be easy, so we decided to design our player in concurrent manner from the very beginning.

Kotlin/Native doesn’t encourage you to use threads, and doesn’t provide a way to share Kotlin objects between threads. Doing it right requires thread synchronisation and certain real-time guarantees, as if audio stream is not being decoded in time, playback sounds choppy, and if video frame is not available when it’s needed, movie doesn’t look smooth. Typically, this job is being done by multiple threads, performing stream decoding, video and audio playback. If you’re interested in comparing how coding in C differs to coding in Kotlin/Native, I would recommend starting with this tutorial.Įvery video player in theory does rather simple job: reads input stream with interleaved video and audio frames, decodes frames and shows video frames, synchronising them with the audio stream. Please see this excellent tutorial, called “How to Write a Video Player in Less Than 1000 Lines” for reference on how it could be done in C language.

Hopefully, it will be useful guide for Kotlin/Native development enthusiasts and will explain intended mechanisms of using the platform.Īs main focus in our tutorial is on Kotlin/Native, we will give only cursory view on how videoplayer shall be developed. Today we take a look on basic video player, using FFMPEG audio/video decoder and SDL2 for rendering.

In this blog post we are discussing development of Kotlin/Native applications.

What is ffmpeg programmed in