QT Components for Ogg Vorbis for Win32

Anyone who was using ogg in QT/iTunes on Win32 has probably cried 1000 rivers full of tears since iTunes6/QT7 came out and broke the implementation from http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/. I know I have. I’m tearing up right now.

Last night while checking again to see if there was any new news on this front, I noticed that someone had released a Macho PPC version. It made me cry more. iTunes on Win32 is a second class citizen indeed. This is one place where banshee on Linux actually beats iTunes. For once, I decided to do something about it. I checked out qtoggvorbis from sourceforge and both ogg and vorbis from xiph. I converted that ancient VC6 project to my trusty Studio 2005 project and solution. I downloaded the QT SDK from Apple. I read. I read more. I read lots. I implemented (hopefully correctly) S64Compare. Apparently an implementation of this was in the QT6 libs but is gone from QT7? I’m not sure. I built. I resolved errors. I ignored 200+ compiler warnings. I changed some project paths. I added include paths. I added library paths. It finally built! I made sure the oggvorbis.qtx was in C:\Windows\System32\QuickTime. I started QuickTime. I openned an ogg. I crashed QuickTime.

I guess it won’t be a trivial port. But it has been fun so far. Next step is to connect the Studio 2005 debugger to the running QuickTime process and see if I can break it in my dll. I hope the qtx format doesn’t mangle this ability. It turns out these qtx files are just dlls with some extra apple stuff (I think things which apple normally places in resource forks, but win32 has no resource forks).

Pray for me to get something working so that we can all enjoy ogg in iTunes.