Video / Movie Playback

[Alex Parlett]

(Phew, remembered the discussion page instead of an issue this time).

So we're about to start working on adding video/movie playback, I'm pretty sure it would be a good addition but it does rely on some additional libraries and just wanted to check you'd be happy with their inclusion in Urho3D like the current libraries or in another fashion (statically linking instead of including the obj files, etc).

The libs are:

• libogg
  
• libvorbis - Actually this is already handled in STB, it provides decoding of vorbis sound files, whether its compatible will have to be checked because the ogg files for video playback contain a theora and vorbis stream.
  
• libtheora
  

They all fall under the following BSD style license: http://www.xiph.org/licenses/bsd/.

There are some considerations as well, it means that there may be (as mentioned above) two instances of the ogg vorbis decoder, it will require an additional thread per video/movie currently playing, it will most likely be added as a UI Element reusing existing classes where possible (Texture2D, Sound, etc) but because there is a need to decode both audio and video on a background thread and only decode a certain number of frames so they are kept in sync and at the correct framerate for the video it may require some duplication of features / code.

[Lasse Öörni]

This is a good idea, and including the libraries as source is fine, just like the existing libraries. But the whole video playback feature should be a compile-time option.

You'll need to create a CMake-based build script for Theora to not have to invoke its own autotools-based make. Remember to check combinations of platforms and 32/64bit. It's OK if Theora doesn't build using optimized assembler routines on all platforms.

[Alex Fuller]

Hi,

Would WebM also be a good option to go with instead of Theora? I think it is a better codec in the sense of bitrate/quality, but it would be more CPU-intensive.

http://www.webmproject.org/