Multimedia Frameworks

[Jason Wood]

On Tuesday 22 Oct 2002 6:21 pm, Peter.Q at gmx.net wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>
> my question to kde-multimedia was about the very same topic. I am also
> trying to write a non linear video editor. I am not sure what exactly you
> have done already. It seems to me, that you have an UI but not underlying
> render engine.

That is correct.

> If that is the case, than your and my part are pretty
> disjunct. I have a library, which is in a very early alpha phase, but can
> already read DV video and take an arbitrary number of streams, and render
> transitions and effects I have some transition effects like picinpic,
> crossfades, imageoverlay, colorframes, alphablend, shiftin, etc. They are
> working (by means of a prove of principle) and I have a very nice way to
> plug all of those together in a very generic way, I can go into detail in
> case you are interested.

I would be very interested indeed! 

> This engine is independent of any gui or multimedia framework (it uses
> gdk-pixbuf at some places, but that can be easily replaced by QPixmap I
> guess). What I am looking for at this point, is:
> a) a GUI framework (probably kde, because I code C++)

To give you a little overview of what my goals are (and I believe that we 
share a lot of common ground here), I am writing a KDE based GUI at the 
moment, which will be independant of whichever engine is used.

The engine will also be independant of the GUI, so that if someone prefered 
Gnome instead of KDE, they could write a new GUI and use it with the same 
engines.

Of course, I am only considering writing one of each for the moment though

:-)

There are a number of other aims which I want to incorporate, such as 
scheduling tasks and using multiple networked computers, but at present they 
are "things to keep in mind", rather than things I am actively working on.

> b) a multimedia framework to do three things:
>     1) help import from all kinds of files and 2) export to all kinds
>     3) display a) single images and b) preview parts of the video

These are the main reasons I have been looking at GStreamer and aRts for 
writing my own cutter/engine. From my GUI's point of view though, it should 
never see or be bothered by the choice of framework or lack thereof. The 
engine will tell the GUI what it is capable of (including which files it can 
handle, which transitions it can generate, etc.) and the GUI will respond by 
making those features available to the user.

> So I am not interested in all the fancy pipelining Gstreamer can to, except
> of the parts which are necessary to import/export all kinds of fancy
> audio/video formats. Also it will be easy to support 3rd party plugins via
> GStreamer (think of effectTV). I wonder, if that is also possible with
> aRts.

I have interest in GStreamer/aRts as it seems like the easiest way to get a 
general-purpose engine up and running in the least amount of time.

But I wonder if you would be interested to see if we can join efforts on this 
one?

Cheers,
Jason

-- 
Jason Wood
Homepage : www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk