[vlc-devel] Re: Using VLC in my application

[Sigmund Augdal]

> >I'd like to use VLC with my current project to playback video files
> >(MPEG-4/DivX/Xvid) in an OpenGL context, that is, using the RGB video
> >output as a texture to be mapped onto 3D geometry. Actually, several
> >streams (up to a total of four) are to be rendered simultaneously.
> 
> cool. however, at the moment vlc can only decode one stream at a time. 
> for this to work would require 4 instances of vlc running and working 
> together. This limititation of VLC will not be fixed soon or quickly 
> unfortunately.
libvlc is reentrant, this mean that you can have four instances of vlc
running in a single process. This could happen when there are several
opbjects in a single web page opening the vlc mozilla plugin.

> >If my understanding of the VLC architecture is correct, I'll need to 
> >write
> >a generic interface plugin and an output plugin which creates/modifies 
> >a
> >GL texture.
This sounds like a good approach, but you may get away with using one of the
existing interface plugins. Among others there is a corba plugin that is
said to provide a clean interface for other apps to controll vlc.
> 
> >I'd really appreciate any pratical hints on how to get started. If 
> >anybody
> >has already accomplished anything similar to my approach (e.g. you 
> >wrote a
> >generic interface plugin), I'd be interested in source code examples, 
> >etc.
> 
> well just look at how other plugins are build.
> modules/video_output/sdl.c and modules/video_output/aa.c are probably 
> two very simple video_output modules. directx and x11 are more 
> complicated but after a while you'll be able to read them.
modules/video_output/aa.c is perhaps the simplest video output plugin, but
it uses 8 bit indexed graphics and this is not suitable as a gl texture. I
whould recommend the sdl plugin.

> 
> Untill lately we didn't really have much API/code documentation, we are 
> however trying to change that, and there is some incomplete information 
> http://developers.videolan.org/vlc/vlc/doc/doxygen/html/
> The video API is fortunately one of the areas which is now partially 
> documented.
Even more fortunatly  the interface api on of the other documented apis(
thanks to zorglub)!

> 
> >I'd also like to know, for example, which source files (from the VLC
> >project) I can build upon (i.e. modify and customize them to fit my 
> >needs)
> >or which ones are worth examining in order to get a better 
> >understanding
> >of VLC's (plugin) architecture.
my recommendataion whould be modules/video_output/sdl.c and
modules/video_output/lirc.c


Sigmund

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