Just to bring everyone else up to speed, we've looked into other options (Java, etc.) and it seems like, since we already recommend VLC Player (
http://www.videolan.org) to watch our VOD content, that this seems a reasonable approach to a new, open-source player - a plugin that we could package on our site with a link to download both VLC itself and the RiffTrax plugin. We're not quite sure what this means for the future of the .riff file - there's the possibility it will hang around for a while, but eventually we'd like to not even require it.
The best part of this direction is, VLC is now packaged with its own codec. Part of the problem with the current player is that, for the most part, it requires a DVD to have captions in order to perform the best syncing (which is still not always accurate). That's a huge problem when it comes to comedy, in which timing is everything. Utilizing VLC's own codec allows us to look directly at DVD timing information on a frame-accurate precision, ensuring us much better synchronicity and user experience.
Not to mention that it's cross-platform and open source.
If there's anyone here that already has experience writing in VLC, or working with DVD information, including codecs, hardware standards, anything of that nature, please PM either myself or Cameron. We want to leverage the community in this and think it'll be a great project, resulting in a fantastic player that we can all be proud of.
