The idea is to create a media player in python.  I don’t really have access to a Mac so I’m using cross platform kind of loosely I guess.

The media backend was the first stumbling block.  On Linux, there’s GStreamer.  On Windows, DirectShow.  I’ve actually used both before and they are both quite nice but I didn’t want to do two different engines.  I could have used GStreamer on Windows but installing it on Windows is no fun.

That left few options.  There’s FMOD but I ruled that out because of licensing.  The same for BASS.

That leaves ffmpeg.  Skip past my efforts at writing a python accessible library for playing media in python.  I revisited a python project called pyglet I had looked over before and realized they had already written a wrapper around a library called AVbin which is itself a wrapper around ffmpeg with a stable ABI.  The project was obviously not created with my needs in mind but it works out quite well.

Which brings me to the user interface, and a break.