[theora-dev] More introductions

[Tabuleiro]

I don't know where Theora is going, but I believe it is going to be more
powerful than what I need at this time. I agree with you that for simple,
basic video playback you don't need a lot of stuff that is now part of Real,
Windows Media and Quicktime. I would love to get a 100K library that only
gets a stream of data (one audio and one video track), plays the audio
(Vorbis compressed) and attempts to retrieve and decompress the current
frame in synch with it as best as it can. Kind of AVI but with a self
contained runtime. I believe Smacker and Bink catered for this market for a
while, and were (are still being) used by a large number of game developers.
That's what I was working on, and I was leaning towards the following
simplistic plan:

1) Interleave audio and video using an AVI like RIFF structure.
2) "Emulate" the VFW behavior, which would give me a hook into the existing
VP3 codec code. The basic VFW API is very simple, and only does a couple of
calls to the codec, basically passing a bag of bytes and requesting a
decompressed frame in a given format (negotiated in advance.) I was planning
to use only one type of surface (probably RGB because it is easier to port,
but I understand the VP3 likes YUV better, and needs additional steps to
decompress to RGB. Is this right?)

This is of course is the simplest possible approach, and some will say it is
too simple and flawed, and the AVI file structure is terrible. On the other
hand I really liked the idea of the Ogg framework and how streams are
organized, though, but I must confess I have not understand it completely :)
, so it seems a little complicated... (able to resume in cases of network
congestion, etc.) Maybe it will be possible to wait and contribute in this
area, so we would use a common and flexible file format.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini
Tabuleiro

>>>>
The existing systems (QuickTime, VFW, Real) are very complex, frequently
buggy, and messy to install.  I think there's a real market for simple,
self-contained VP3+Vorbis playback library.  I'd love to see Theora evolve
in this direction.

How much work do you think would be required to get from here to there?

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