[vlc-devel] Intergrating libVLC with real-time graphics library

[Robert Osfield]

Hi All,

I am currently scoping out how to integrated video into an open source 
real-time graphics library (www.openscenegraph.org), I would like to support 
rendering of streamed video as well as videos played from DVD and local disk.  
Much of what libVLC provides appears to fit many of the requirements, so I'm 
looking into how I might integrate it.

The current design of libVLC appears to be designed around providing a modular 
way of creating a VLC style application, which is not quite what I need in my 
case so I'll need to work with it in a slightly unusual way.  I'd like 
suggestions for the dev community about how I might be go about it.

What I'm aiming for is to be able to have a 3D world, such as a movie theatre, 
or a gallary, or just kiosk in museum or TV in a house, this world would be 
created programatically, or in a 3D modeller like 3D Studio MAX or Maya, then 
imported into the graphics application.  Within the the 3D database there 
will be references to external images which provide the textures, and 
potential refernces to movie files on disk or possibly just an address of 
where to stream the movie from.  The graphics application will need to pick 
out the movie imagery and set up libVLC and all its associated threads and 
modules to create the imagery that can be subloaded into OpenGL textures.  
Now the graphics application will delegate all this work to a plugin that 
I'll be writing for the OpenSceneGraph.

Once I've written this plugin (which will encapsulate all the complexities of 
setting things up) lots of different graphics application could be written 
which leverage VLC's video functionality, since the graphics application will 
have to do little more than do then specifiy a string specifying the movie to 
read it'll be easy to add this functionality.  The OpenSceneGraph is pretty 
scalable, and widely used in the field of VR, so you'll even be able to see 
videos in fully immersive environments.

My first question is, is the vlc-dev the right mailing list to be discussing 
such developer integration topics, or is this more of an vlc-user topic?  It 
might be that small ammendments to libVLC might make my task much easier, it 
may be even that the VideoLan community would want to provide a full 3D 
graphics version of the player (I'm not about to write this, but I'm sure 
happy to help open a few doors in this direction:-).

I'll write more technical questions in a follow up email.

Robert.

ps. a bit of background of myself, I'm an OpenGL/C++ nut and I'm the project 
lead and lead author of the OpenSceneGrpah, a scene graph API that sits on 
top of OpenGL.  Its all open source/free software and I've made my living 
from providing consultancy, bespoke development and support ontop of the 
OpenSceneGraph for the past four years.  I'm based in Scotland.


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