[mythtv-users] Internal Video player

[J. Donavan Stanley]

Isaac Richards wrote:
> 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.


That's the main reason I put all this in it's own little library. I'm 
thinking it'd be best done as a plugin for plugins. The only interface 
that's *needed* is a the PlayMRL function plus maybe a callback so that 
the player can request more content for things like play lists.




>>>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.

I was thinking more of the visualizations and what not.  If I remember 
right both MythMusic and Xine use the same libraries for playback.



>>>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.

I only had a small sample set of files here on this machine to test 
with.  Some didn't play at all, some had video errors such has blocky 
videos and bands across the screen, yet other played fine.  There's 
apparently a codec or two within the avi/asf containers that aren't 
being handled.

It's possible it's something simple to fix I couldn't say without 
digging into things.  Unfortunately I don't have time to get the things 
done I want/need to get done as it is let alone go digging.




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

I think that's our only major difference.  Where you see a liability in 
a dependency I see an asset.  While it's true using xine-lib makes us 
dependent on them, it also means that one less thing Myth developers 
have to worry about.

Maybe the dependencies we already have could fit the bill.  I'm honestly 
not familiar with them enough to answer that.  When I saw how easy it 
would be to leverage xine-lib and knew that it'd play damn near anything 
  I started mucking around.


> 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.  

I've got some ideas that could help tie things together a bit better, 
and would make it easier to add things like the streaming content in a 
seamless manner.  I just need to sit down and work out how it all should 
work.


> All I'm saying is that everything could be done with the native video player 
 > in mythtv with a little more effort, is  all.

No argument there.