[vlc-devel] Project: Video Barcodes for VLC

[mirsal]

Hi Sebastian,

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 01:20 +0100, Sebastian Morr wrote:
> I'd like to share my progress regarding video barcodes with you.
> This is how it looks like right now: http://files.morr.cc/nemo-barcode.png
> 
> The barcode is generated each time a video file is opened. For a 7.5 GB
> 1080p file on an USB2.0-connected hard drive, with a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo, that
> takes about a minute. For the screenshot's movie, it takes about 4 seconds.
> The already generated part is updated every second. There's still a lot of
> potential for speed optimizations.
>
> Implementation-wise, this is a still an early prototype, a proof of
> concept that required a minimum of changes on the code:
> 
> - The barcode generation itself is done by a small external FFmpeg-based
>   library [1].
> - A "mediabarcode" module is introduced that has the "art finder"
>   capability. When evoked, it starts generating the barcode, writes it
>   to a file each second, and sets the item's art URL to it.
> - The qt4 GUI's SeekSlider gets notified on art changes and reads the
>   file to a "barcode" QPixmap member variable.
> - The SeekStyleBarcode draws this QPixmap as the slider's background and
>   draws the handle a little different.
> 
> The diff to the current master is here:
> 
>     https://github.com/blinry/vlc/compare/master...mediabarcode

This is cool stuff :)

> If you'd like me to send the patches to this list, please tell me, but the
> code isn't ready for review yet, at all. The code requires a UNIXoid right
> now, as it saves the barcode in /tmp.
> 
> To try the code, you will need to build the mediabarcode library [1], if
> you encounter any problems there, please tell me. I guess many of you
> would appreciate a .deb package?
> 
> Now, here are ideas to implement a barcode functionality properly:
> 
> While video files normaly don't have album art (?),

As a matter of fact, some do.

For instance, many UPnP media servers send cover art among video
metadata for films.

>  which would allow
> this "abuse", the barcode generation *could* be extended to audio files
> (like Amarok's moodbar, or just a display of volume). Because of this, the
> barcode information should be stored parallel to the artwork.
> 
> While the file-based approach allows for easy caching, which is very
> desirable here, a purely memory-based method would be generating faster.
> What are your thoughts here? Where could a "barcode frame" be stored? The
> input_item itself doesn't feel like the right place for me.
> 
> So far, the mediabarcode library seeks to keyframes only. This works
> perfectly for movies, not so well for short videos where you can have a
> lot of timestamps seeking to the same keyframe. Using an approach similar
> to ffmpeg-fas [2], it should be possible to solve this.
>
> 1: https://github.com/blinry/mediabarcode
> 2: https://github.com/lbrandy/ffmpeg-fas

Best,

-- 
mirsal 
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