[theora] More information on GSoC project

[Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 10:17 AM,
<saulgoode at flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com> wrote:
> Sorry about the preceding post, I have a pretty crappy email service.
>
>
>  On 4/2/08, Nuwan Millawitiya <millawitiya at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > I am interesting to do this project. I am a student of computer
>  > science & engineering. Nowadays I am working with theora codec to optimize
>  > the theora codec for narrow bandwidth conferencing. According to Saul\'s
>  > and Ivo Emanuel Gonçalve\'s reply, this is an interesting project and it is
>  > very useful.
>  > According to the Saul\'s reply, this can be done. (But I never worked
>  > with the code of GIMP).
>  >
>  > On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo at gmail.com>
>  > wrote:
>  >
>
> >> Saul is clearly the one who can tell if this is feasable, but my idea
>  >> was to build a wrapper around png2theora. So, I guess GIMP would
>  >> export all data to PNG first and then pass it through png2theora and
>  >> get a video file.
>
>  To be more precise about the task, it is not directly GIMP which is to
>  be modified, but the GIMP Animation Package (GAP). The GAP is
>  technically maintained as a separate project from GIMP -- it has its
>  own Bugzilla bug-tracking module & release schedule, and is typically
>  offered as a separate download (this sort of separation is also seen
>  in the GIMP-HELP and the GIMP-PRINT projects).
>
>  I emphasize the nature of this because it simplifies the task of
>  adding OGG Theora support to GIMP. There is no need to modify GIMP
>  code (or even examine it); the GAP is implemented as a set of plug-ins
>  that communicate with GIMP through a Procedural DataBase (PDB) and
>  transfer image data to and from the GIMP core in a \"pixel region\" or
>  tile-based manner (plug-ins do not directly access image data). There
>  is more information about this on the second page Dave Neary\'s
>  tutorial (see http://developer.gimp.org/writing-a-plug-in/1/index.html).


Saulgode,

>
>  An encoder only needs to retrieve image data from the GIMP -- there is
>  no need to send any image data back to the core -- and the data only
>  needs to be accessed once. This means that \"pixel region\" based
>  retrieval method (which is simpler to implement than the tile-based
>  method) would be sufficient.
>
>  The image data is stored using the RGB colorspace, 8-bits per pixel
>  per channel. There are functions available in libgimp to convert to
>  Y\'CbCr space but it would probably be more efficient to code that
>  yourself. It might even be simpler owing to the added problem of
>  padding out the Theora pages to 16-pixel boundaries.
>
>  The idea of saving to a PNG and then calling png2theora would work,
>  but is probably more complicated than performing the conversion
>  directly (and adds a dependency). (In fact, the GAP\'s
>  \"Video->Convert frames\" command can currently be used to save the
>  images to PNG format which can then be converted to Theora using
>  png2theora externally).


How does the data retrieved from GIMP looks like? Does the plugin
receive simply N frames with widthXheight 8-bit rgb pixels only
waiting to be encoded?



>
>  The task of adding OGG Theora encoding to GIMP is certainly feasible
>  and I should be more than willing to assist a GSoC project from a
>  technical level (I am not willing to join Google Groups or be an
>  official mentor).
>
>
>
>
>
>
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