Is it really that hard? Question for the programmers.

[damnskippy]

To create a stable, functional, full featured software player that actually works properly? Not being a programmer I don't really know but I have a hard time understanding how the biggest two (TMT & PDVD) are so messed up. Not to mention how often a patch breaks more than it fixes.

I am not wanting to start a flame war against the other companies I really am curious as to how big an undertaking it is.

[mike_r]

Working in the IT industry, it's one of the most 'enjoyable' questions of recent times.

100 person days effort cannot be speeded up by getting 100 people to work on the task for 1 day. Similarly a $1000 'onshore' expert, is not more expensive than a $250 a day 'offshore' expert.

Sadly the people who make the descisions only see the overview.

100 onshore mandays @ $1000 = $100000
100 onshore mandays @ $250 = $25000

The result is generally a comprimise in quality, with the overall actual effort greatly increased.

I don't believe that the development for PowerDVD or TMT is done differently.

[Fernando]

überblickYeah, you're right.

You finally have 100 people that create 100 DLLs that are completely incompatible to each other. And instead of cleaning this mess up, you just create another 100 DLLs that fix other buggy DLLs which are again incompatible. And if you completely lost your project's overlook you make a major version bump, declare your old software as deprecated/no longer supported and reset your support ticket system. That's how those companies work.

An example: If you find libraries named AC3Dec.dll, AdavAC3Dec.dll, Ac3HDDecoderDll.dll you see 3 iterations of the same thing. There's no need to create 100 DLLs, you can put all features into a single DLL. But only if your developers work as a team.

[damnskippy]

Understood.

So the player software is not really a difficult application to make if you work properly.

Once you get into fairly large applications does the difficulty factor level off?