How to implement a multi-platform multimedia application?

Question

On which technological basis would you implement a multimedia app, which has to meet the following requirements:

• Platforms: Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Linux (nice to have)
• Should play audio (mp3) and video (H.264 would be great) from local disk

I looked into things like Cocotron which is a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to Cocoa, but I am not very confident if it would be the right choice.

Would it be simpler to have a separate code base for each OS (WPF on Windows, Cocoa on Mac OS X)?

I also experimented with browser-based apps (Flash-Player, accessing local files through a streaming server provided by VLC) but came to the conclusion, that this would be a very fragile solution.

How about Mono?

Answer 1

One thing I would consider would be to potentially write your core engine in some sort of multi platform fashion, maybe in python, but probably in C, using libraries that have binaries available on all platforms. Then, multiple frontends for each platform, i.e Cocoa for OSX, Windows specific code, and GTK for linux.

However, an easier solution from a maintenance point of view may be to just use as cross platform toolkit like QT