[mythtv-users] Internal Video player

[Isaac Richards]

On Thursday 08 January 2004 08:55 pm, J. Donavan Stanley wrote:
> Isaac Richards wrote:
> > On Thursday 08 January 2004 07:37 pm, J. Donavan Stanley wrote:
> >
> > I will not have any major portions of mythtv depend on a large outside
> > project.  I'd consider mythvideo to be a non-major portion of mythtv (ie,
> > I don't use it, ever), so it's fine for that.
>
> That's fine by me... I would assume you consider MythDVD a non-major
> portion as well then since it depends on large outside projects for half
> of it's functionality?

Yup.   I'd still like for your stuff to remain optional if it's possible, so 
as to still allow people to build without it and use another media player if 
they so desire.

> > And, btw, mythmusic plays CDs just fine.
>
> Yes it does.  But it's reinventing the wheel.

Not really.  The CD playing parts are _maybe_ 100 lines of code that use 
libcdparanoia which was already being used for cd ripping -- everything else 
in cddecoder is just the decoder wrapper logic and cddb interfacing code.

> > Llibavcodec/libavformat support most file formats,
>
> After reading Joseph's message I tried out a handful of files asf and
> avi playback were both horrid using mythtv <file.asf>.  MPEG playback
> was fine but that's to be expected.

Last I checked, avis played fine, aside from the lack of support for seeking.  
Lower framerate / audio quality streams may cause some problems, but nothing 
that I'd consider difficult to fix.

> > and streaming is essentially trivial to add (and even exists in
> > libavformat already).
>
> Again, reinventing the wheel.

Tying together stuff that's already in mythtv instead of adding a huge 
dependency isn't exactly reinventing the wheel.

>  > DVDs would require tying the internal player to
> >
> > libdvdread simply to read the data off and some minor changes to the
> > decoder class to allow it to select which audio stream to play.
>
> Not to mention code to navigate the menus, code to support playing back
> a DVD from a directory, etc etc. Which of course is more reinventing of
> the wheel.
>
> Note: I'm in no way shape or form disrespecting the hard work and talent
> that's gone into ALL portions of Myth.  My goal with the xine-lib stuff
> was to bring some consistency to the various media playback components
> and the leverage existing solutions.  After all, it's about itches, this
> is one of my personal itches.  If it's not yours, that's fine. The
> beauty of open source is that we're all free to scratch our own itches.

If a little bit of work removes (or prevents adding) a dependency on yet 
another project, I consider that work is _well_ worth it.

It's great that you _are_ integrating things more than some other people are 
attempting (ie, the streaming thread on -dev), so I consider that a great 
step forward for mythvideo/dvd.  All I'm saying is that everything could be 
done with the native video player in mythtv with a little more effort, is 
all.

Isaac