Hi,

Many of you will be aware of my mediaserv on-demand video converter.

Currently it's pretty much limited to Unix-like OSes such as Linux and (apparently) Mac OS X.

This is because it's written in Perl, and Perl's threading is a bit ropey on, say, Windows. Unfortunately, it's a bit ropey on everything and I'm not quite happy with it.

So, I'm thinking of rewriting the mediaserv bit in another language with a more robust multi-threaded implementation. tablet-encode would stay in Perl.

The disadvantage of a rewrite would be that it becomes trickier to install (potentially): the same dependencies you need for tablet-encode are not sufficient for mediaserv.

So, the poll above is to garner input from the users here. The choices are:

1. Do nothing. Carry on polishing the existing Perl version, but it works fine for you and don't need it on Windows (because you don't use it or you have better options such as TVersity)
2. Java. Very powerful threading, implementations on many OSes, easy to ship and install an application containing all its dependencies. Most likely to be my choice, but then I have Java runtimes on all my boxes.
3. Python. Seems to have better threading than Perl.
4. C/D/Vala. Probably the latter two. Possibly even Vala. Not sure how well it works for non-Windows apps. Lack of docs for Vala. D is possibly too esoteric.
5. C#. Would run on Linux under Mono, but I've no burning desire to learn it.
6. Ruby. I've got "Programming Ruby" on my bookshelf. Not sure how good its thread implementation is.

Remember, this is for the server component; the UI would still be through Media Player/mplayer, the web browser and RSS feeds.

Anything I'm missing?