Re: Video Player

["' '" <tint14 hotmail com>]

>I have to write a video player on Linux. Can any one tell that how shall
>I proceed.
>I have developed my own decoder library ,but now I want to write an
>application also to demonstrate the library's capabilities.
>
>Thanking u very much
>  Regards
>
>Nitin

Well, presumably, you'd just write a frontend for the decoder library you 
already wrote -- how you do that depends upon how you wrote your decoder 
library. If you want an example of a media player that uses backend 
libraries to handle the video and a frontend gtk+ gui, you could check out 
xine. It's open source (of course :) ), so you could look at it for 
inspiration or even copy large chunks of the code if you're not looking to 
develop something completely new. I don't think the gtk+ gui comes with the 
main xine package, so you may have to download it separately.

On a slightly different note, if you want to work with a specific media type 
under linux that you don't think is already supported, be sure to take a 
look at other linux multimedia projects out there. When I found out xine 
could load windows codecs without modification, I was pretty impressed. I 
was even more surprised to learn that it's a standard feature in mplayer 
(the other big linux media player) and gstreamer (a linux multimedia 
framework that serves roughly the same purpose directshow does in windows). 
Also, I've read that mplayer has native support for old quicktime files, and 
can load and play new quicktime files if it has access to the windows 
quicktime components available in the free win32 qt player. I've played old 
quicktime files with xine, but don't have any experience with new ones.

If you just can't find a media player for linux that already does what you 
need, and you wrote the decoder library so you could access a particular 
kind of previously unsupported content, there's another way you can easily 
play that content without having to write your own frontend: you could write 
a plugin for an already existing media player. By making a contribution to 
xine-libs, adding to mplayer's backend, or creating a gstreamer component, 
the respective application or framework would gain the ability to play 
whatever content you need. If you're writing this code for someone else, 
they'll probably appreciate being able to run a program they already know 
how to use in order to play the new media type. There's also the added 
benefit that everyone else who uses gnu/linux will benefit from your work. 
;)

Of course, if you're writing the decoder and frontend just for kicks, none 
of that is really necessary. A peek at xine-gtk should get you started.

Hope that helps!


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