Hello, I think replicating the current movie module API is a good aim. It has all the basics really, and is quite simple.
One approach to take might be to use the cmd line version of ffmpeg... this would allow people to use the module without nessesarily recompiling pygame. The other benefit of this approach would be you'd avoid ffmpegs unstable API (they promise not to have a stable API). Pipes are a fairly fast way to go. If we can find an image/audio format that is fast with both pygame, and ffmpeg, this could work quite well I think. Another way to do the movie module is to run the output in a separate process, and tell the movie player to use a pygame window id. People have used mplayer successfully to play movies with pygame. The test player that comes with ffmpeg uses SDL - which means this approach can be used with that too. It's very likely that if someone has ffmpeg installed, they also have the ffmpeg example player. It's quite important to keep the API library neutral. This way the movie module could have: 1. an smpeg backend. 2. an ffmpeg backend, using compiled ffmpeg/SDL_ffmpeg. 3. a pipe using ffmpeg backend. 4. an mplayer/vlc/ffmpeg SDL player based backend using the window id hack. Saving movies using ffmpeg might be something to explore after playback is handled. Especially a save to flash video option would be great for making demos of games. Also of note, is the vnc2swf project which uses pygame to record VNC sessions as flash videos. For movie playback, using the SDL overlays can be an efficient way to playback video. It's accelerated on many computers. cu, On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:10 AM, Tyler Laing <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello all, > > One of the first steps I need to take for the GSoC project is to get user > stories so I can build acceptance tests. > > I want to hear what you guys(the users) want out of an updated movie > module. What do you want to be able to do, and how? > > I'm also interested in hearing what people liked and didn't like about the > current movie module. > > -Tyler > > -- > Visit my blog at http://oddco.ca/zeroth/zblog >
