[vlc-devel] new filter module for special hardware

[Andre Weber]

Hello,

I'am new to the list my name is André - at the moment I have done a setup of cygwin - to
build vlc 0.8.6c Source - after some problem now it works - but I still suffering that
my newly build module works only with my own build VLC if I copy the (plugin DLL)
to my normal Installation ofr 0.8.6c it crashes immediately - what other things I have
to check? or todo?

currently my cygwin environment has GCC 3.4.4 but the official build of Videolan
was done with GCC 3.4.5 is this a possible cause of my crashes?

as base for my development I use these files:
--> contrib-20070530-win32-bin-gcc-3.4.5-only.tar
--> vlc-0.8.6c.tar.gz

another thing I had to do for a successful build with theses packages was do disable
--disable-dts
--disable-flac
for the moment I just ignore these missing functionality... is this a another possible cause
of my crashes if I copy my self build module to a normale release folder?


Why I am doing this? -- there is a group of HTPC / VDR users in Germany that has build
its own Ambilight (do you know this from the philipps TV's?) - this hardware uses
highpower RGB LED's to illumninate the wall behind the TV the colors are calculated
from a software running on the PC depending on the content of the screen - but
the "screen-grabbing" slows down the PC very much - because we can't use overlayed
video output or VMR ...and have to call slow GDI  Api for this.

(we call the hardware AtmoLight - to avoid conflicts on patents from philipps)

Here is the homepage of the project http://www.vdr-wiki.de/wiki/index.php/Atmo-plugin
http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?threadid=57731,
http://www.vdr-portal.de/board/thread.php?threadid=58491)
(currently only in german but with some videos and pictures to show for what
I'am doing this - the software on theses pages is only for Linux VDR, I have
ported the software to Windows

So I decided to try build an own filter module for videolan which does a part of the
calculation - as base for my work I used the disort filter and ripped off all code
where I thought its not neccessary for my purpose.

My filter forwards the incoming picture 1:1 into the VLC filter chaing - at the moment
I have found no way to avoid to copy the incoming picture of my Render methode
so I allways make a "vout_CopyPicture" which I put into vout_DisplayPicture - is there a
way to put my source picture into vout_DisplayPicture(?) ?

The main job of the filter is to extract a small image (64x48 Pixels) from each frame
without interpolation just skipping pixels theses image is used in "our userspace driver"
application to calculate the required values for our hardware.

Extracting a small image (64x48) out of incoming picture_t and converting it into
RGB24 works allready - now I am working on the part call the "user space"
Driver application which I have written on windows - but this is another problem
I think which I have to solve -- doing a COM Call inside a filter module ...


with best regards

André Weber

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