Re: Video support

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 03:20 -0500, Gabriel Burt wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 09:10 +0100, Paul Cooper wrote:
> > Thanks for the pointer - it was seeing the Gdv stuff on the Diva blog
> > that got me thinking about video support in f-spot. For now it would be
> > great if I could work out how to include video files in the db, tag
> > them, and show a snapshot frame (like nautilus) and then launch totem
> > when clicked. Inline playing would be great but right now I'm just
> > struggling to work out how to do the simple stuff.
> 
> Okay, makes sense to bite of bits (well, chunks really :)) at a time.
> The database shouldn't need to be modified for this, it doesn't care
> about file types at all.  Tagging should work fine too.  The problem is
> getting the photos in and represented as objects that can work in that
> framework.
> 
> I'm not familiar with adding new formats in, but doing a quick grep
> PngFile * on the source shows that you'll need to add an entry to
> ImageFile.cs for the file types you're wanting to support, and the
> corresponding class that knows about them (which implements the virtual
> methods of ImageFile).  There are issues like disabling features you
> likely don't want to implement for videos (like rotating), etc, but I
> think that should get you started.
> 

Supporting video clips are definitely a possibility since they are
something that many many cameras produce and have organizational
requirements similar to photos. Having said that I really don't want
f-spot to be in the business of video editing so sticking to some simple
tagging/playing (using the gnome mime db for player) would probably be a
good goal.

Timeline wise I don't have any room to work on this myself and I don't
consider it high priority, but if any of you are sufficiently motivated
I'll try to help out.  Gabiel's suggestion on how to get started is
good, in the long run abusing ImageFile like that is a bad idea but it
is a good place to start playing.

--Larry