ZP External Media Engine - Milestone #1 Achieved

I previously explained the benefits of extracting Zoom Player's media engine into a separate process, but the biggest, is the ability for the user interface to remain active as media is loading/streaming, especially if the media is problematic and the process is frozen by the underlying streaming/decoding components or servers.

Today, after many many hours of copying, pasting and editing (literally days), to the point my mind practically begged for the mercy of any other occupation, forcing me to find an inner peace to allow me to continue past this kafakaesque existence, I've finally managed to get the external media engine to compile!

What does that mean? Not much really, just the first milestone reconstructing 25 years of code by hand (AI still isn't good enough for this level of complexity).

The next milestone is creating a small sample app to test that I can actually embed an external video playing process inside another process. It should be possible in theory, browsers do it, but it's a new field for me and I'm hoping all the various media renderers play nice with this design.

Luckily, the external media engine code is now very tight, with the source clocking in at a svelte 330kb, small enough that AI should hopefully be able to help me push development faster. I'm reviewing/editing the code to verify it's optimized and slop free, but it sure is nice when AI does most of the grunt work.