OwlWatcher is broken, and what will happen to fix it

Summary

The video support in OwlWatcher for OSX is broken, in both Leopard and Snow Leopard. As far as I can tell, it still works in Windows. I am working on a fix for the problem which will require use of a different video player (Quicktime support in Java is gone and Apple seems to have no interest in bringing it back). I am investigating alternative player frameworks, some based on JMF, some on wrappers for FFMPEG, and some which are both. I expect the result of this will be a more complex installation process, at least for OSX, but it will also open up the possibility of using OwlWatcher on Linux (something I've been wanting for a while now).

Rant
Apple's support for Quicktime in java has always been rather spotty, and developers have been burned by Java upgrades which broke Quicktime before. I investigated alternative Quicktime bindings this week (Rococoa), but those seem to be broken in Snow Leopard as well. Although I expect the Rococoa developer(s) will eventually try to address this, there are alternatives to Quicktime, especially for this application, so it is time to finally make OwlWatcher independent of Quicktime.

I should have done this a while ago, and I apologize for anyone who has been inconvenienced by this. I do not blame Apple for OwlWatcher breaking, I was expecting something like this to happen. However, I should point out that there was apparently a Java update from Apple that also broke Quicktime support in 10.5 (Leopard) and I'm rather disappointed that things broke even without an upgrade to SnowLeopard.

It was suggested that I consider an alternative to Java. Unfortunately, I don't think reimplementing this in Python (which seems more to my taste than Perl, though I've written a bit more of the latter) would necessarily avoid this sort of breakage. Apple seemed to be promoting Python and Perl as having Cocoa support in 10.5, but, looking at the new X-code IDE for Snow Leopard, their enthusiasm for these languages has waned. Unfortunately, it seems at the moment that some of the most interesting work in scripting languages is going on with languages like Scala and Clojure, which are also jvm-based. So much the worse for Apple, though I'm sure it won't affect the sale of iPhones or the development of applications, which seems to be where Apple's focus increasingly lies.