sfeMovie project [v1.0 RC1 available]

[Ceylo]

1. Make sure the video format is really Theora and the audio format is really Vorbis.
2. You can indeed try to build it but if the point is an unsupported video/audio codec, building with the same configuration (ie. enabling only flac, theora and ogg) should produce the same results. You can give it a try with more decoders though.
3. It would be nice if I could get a piece of your video to test it.
4. If you only need Theora and Vorbis support you can have a look at SFMLTheora.

The video is freely available from http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/
I downloaded the lowest resolution OGG format.
I checked in vlc it's codec details and it is theora and vorbis(as the site says).

I will check out SFMLTheora and see if it is a replacement. One feature i want is to get the current frame and set it to an opengl texture.

Thank you for your fast reply.

I tested the video again and it's playing fine now.

[Ceylo]

I did the naming convention change and I now use sf::Time. So sfeMovie is now usable with SFML 2.0.

Currently I'm trying to find out how to make sure it'll run on Windows XP too. On Mac OS X there are SDK to build your application against some older OS version, but I don't know if there is something similar on Windows.

Does one of you know about it ?

[Laurent]

There's nothing to do, it should work.

[Ceylo]

sfeMovie 1.0 RC1 available => see wiki

Everything you need to know should be in the wiki. I'm waiting for your questions or comments! If everything goes well, sfeMovie 1.0 will be released when SFML 2.0 is released.

For those who want to see a demo (Windows) : sfeMovie Demo.zip

[Ceylo]

Not much feedback except one person on the French forum !

Has something annoyed or stopped you ? or some other reason ?

When the final v1.0 is released, I'll make a new topic in the right section : SFML projects.

[Ceylo]

I've just noticed there was an issue with the RC1 sources download (the link was fine but nobody could download the file). It's fixed.

[Nexus]

Hey, this project still looks very interesting. At the moment, it's just a little bit difficult for me to fully exploit it, because I'm currently occupied with Thor and another project, but nevertheless I hope to spend some time on it soon. Do you know if sfeMovie works well for Visual Studio?

[Ceylo]

Hello Nexus,

Yes it is working well with Visual Studio, except for one point : I noticed than when launching the exe within the EDI, it crashes at exit (after main() is over), whereas it doesn't when launched from the Explorer. I had hoped to get some feedback about it, to see whether I'm the only one concerned or not (or because of some specific hardware for example).

This is something I want to fix before the 1.0 release, in case I find out it depends on my work. The reason is still unknown.

As for the performances, they are as good as with MinGW.

[DJuego]

This project is fantastic! Thanks Ceylo!

Have you considered adapt it for other video sources? Camera adquisition? Stream video? images-generated-on-the-fly?... it would be fantastic!

I made a very very simple (and very very useful) class (I named CDisplay) for showing *video* with SDL a varios years ago. The *input* was unsigned char * uncompressed RGB frames (bitmap images). LOL! Nothing professional of course (my skills are low) but it worked like a charm for my purposes.

More details: I worked with a SAPERA SDK from Teledyne Dalsa and a photonfocus Camera. The adquisition speed was 200 frames per second. The display render speed was unknown ()

DJuego

Sorry for my shocking English.

[Ceylo]

Thanks for your comment

No I haven't considered these features yet. I prefer to focus on simple and basic features for now, and make sure everything is reliable. Especially as far as Visual Studio is concerned (see previous posts).

Once everything is ok, there are a few other features I would like to focus on, before extending sfeMovie to a wider area : seeking and subtitles. And once this is done, maybe playing video from other sources like RTSP streams or custom input streams. Remember that sfeMovie is still a video player, not a video recorder or generator.

May I ask which resolution you were using for your frames ?

Ceylo

[DJuego]

Once everything is ok, there are a few other features I would like to focus on, before extending sfeMovie to a wider area : seeking and subtitles. And once this is done, maybe playing video from other sources like RTSP streams or custom input streams. Remember that sfeMovie is still a video player, not a video recorder or generator.

A cold and organized mind.  I like it!

May I ask which resolution you were using for your frames ?

Yep! 640 x 480. Obviously, the parameter was configurable.

Originally, in operation mode, the 'display' had to be turn off or the system missed frames. The threading improved it but not enough  . At last the display only could be used in calibration mode  .

In any case the images was very bored. You can believe me. A damned cross-platform industrial OCR.  It was built with Visual Studio and GNU gcc (Mingw port & Ubuntu).

DJuego

[Ceylo]

Yep! 640 x 480. Obviously, the parameter was configurable.

Originally, in operation mode, the 'display' had to be turn off or the system missed frames. The threading improved it but not enough  . At last the display only could be used in calibration mode  .

In any case the images was very bored. You can believe me. A damned cross-platform industrial OCR.  It was built with Visual Studio and GNU gcc (Mingw port & Ubuntu).

DJuego

Does it mean the rendering process was consuming too much time ?

[DJuego]

Does it mean the rendering process was consuming too much time ?

Not too much time. Simply, our requirements were unreasonable at that time and at that place. 

In any case 200 frames per second, 5ms per frame...  Although it could make it we wouldn't *see* it (refresh monitor limits). Nowdays 3D monitor refreshes the screen to 120hz or so. AND...  too fast for the human visual pathway 


Our solution for rendering (more or less) was:
             
First. A thread for rendering.

Second. When a new frame was adquired from camera (SAPERA calls to our callback function)...

We test if the render process was busy(with an old frame).

    - if yes, the new frame was not rendered (discard rendering).

    - if no, the new frame is rendered (concurrently).

***

Here, the character recognition process (in very broad outlines) <- Industrial secret  ...¡nah!

***

The callback function returns. The system is ready for new frames.

DJuego

Sorry for my English! 

P.S: SAPERA is the adquisition card driver

                         
                                 

[Ceylo]

Uh ok I understand better. 200 frames/second, that's quite a lot to process for the OCR system. And of course too much for displays, but not important as human can't see it, as you said.

Sounds quite efficient even if you said it wasn't professional.
As for the industrial secret, if I didn't miss the point : there are 'not that bad' free and open source OCR systems now, such as Tesseract.

Ceylo

[Ceylo]

The crash at exit when running within Visual Studio has been identified.

It's similar to https://github.com/SFML/SFML/issues/30 (although not the exact same one) and can be fixed by using the latest OpenAL DLL from http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html.

Thus there is no more known bug for Visual Studio where sfeMovie is responsible.