Mar 2011
Video Monkey 0.10 Solves Problems on Leopard
17/03/11 19:16 Filed in: News
Many of you were experiencing problems with 0.9 not working at all on Leopard. That was because I was cleverly trying to make Video Monkey into a 64 bit application. I was hoping for super-fast encoding speeds and an app built ... for the future! I was so naive back in those days (3 weeks ago).Video Monkey has always been for Leopard and above. Leopard supports 64 bit so I thought I had it made. I wasn't thinking about the 32 bit Macs still supported by Leopard. No problem, I thought. I'll just make Video Monkey "universal" - capable of working on both 32 bit and 64 bit Macs. Not so fast. To do that you'd need to make a universal version of ffmpeg, the core of Video Monkey's encoding function. That is much harder than it sounds, and in fact I've spent the last 3 weeks unsuccessfully trying to do just that.
Turns out that the build tools for ffmpeg create a 64 bit executable on Snow Leopard (which is a pure 64 bit OS) and a 32 bit executable on Leopard (which is a hybrid). Sounds perfect? Maybe, but the 64 bit executable SL builds is not compatible with Leopard and I have been unable to convince Leopard to build me a 64 bit ffmpeg, which I assume would work on both. For applications built with XCode this is a simple problem - you simply build on Snow Leopard with a Leopard SDK. But ffmpeg doesn't use XCode. So I'll have to try harder or find an ffmpeg guru in the crowd.
In the meantime, here is a version that is 32 bit only. It should work on both Leopard and Snow Leopard. Please let me know if it doesn't. While going through all this pain I also found the time to fix a few of the bugs some of you have posted with 0.9.
Thanks for supporting Video Monkey!