Last week I spent considerable time (all of it :) working on the integration of “lion capture” into iSHowU HD. Here’s an update of where things are at:

1. The capture side (including efficient YUV conversion) is now working. This includes recording of audio.
2. HD is happily capable of converting existing presets (or new ones) into the “lion” equivalents. Essentially, anything that isn’t H.264 becomes JPEG. H.264 stays as it is. ProRes (when it’s working, which it isn’t right now) will be converted to … ProRes!
3. The audio side (from a UI perspective, remapping channels, audio preview, etc) isn’t done yet. That’s next weeks job.
4. As mentioned above, ProRes doesn’t work yet. I’m going to concentrate on getting HD working first, and released, before I return to get ProRes working. In the meantime it will be removed as a codec option. But don’t worry. I do know about it and want it to be there. I’ll have to raise a DTS with Apple to find out if it’s a bug in their API – I can’t even get it working in a really simple test app.
5. Rate limiting needs some work. You don’t notice it so much on fast machines, but Core2Duo’s (what I’ve been using for this work) are currently more “stuttery” than I’d prefer.

The conversion of video… getting HD to use the Lion APIs directly… took me way longer than I’d hoped. As I checked in today, I had a look at some code metrics. I was surprised by what I saw. I counted only code (not binaries, pics etc) and I’ve written 9,253 lines of code to make AVFoundation work the way I want (e.g: work around issues/bugs, performance problems, buffer tracking, subrect clipping, etc etc etc). I guess in that respect, taking a month to do it ain’t that bad! I was somewhat shocked to see that this effort has required that much code. I mean: why?

Well, I’m not even going to try to think on that over the next week. I’ll just get on with what I have to do and get a new version of HD out. Based on current estimates I’m about 1/2 way through the work. That means I’m not going to hit the date I previously mentioned of early next week. Looks like it’ll be more mid/end of coming week.