[GEM-dev] Re: [PD] GEM Linux and video codecs

[Etienne Desautels]

Hello,

On 05-06-05, at 17:14, Tim Blechmann wrote:

> hi all ...
>
>>> Also, what I would really prefer is to had support in Gem for
>>> LibMPEG2.  Do you think it could be difficult to do ? Is it about
>>> creating a  filmMPEG2.cpp and filmMPEG2.h files with the good
>>> function calls to the  library and add the reference into the
>>> pix_filmNEW.cpp ?
>>
>> correct.
>> if you like to add libMPEG2-support you are welcome!
> stupid question, but what about mplayer support instead of libMPEG2?
> mplayer is able to play back about every file format ...
>
> just thinking loud ... tim

I know, it would be wonderfull...

But Mplayer is not a library. You can only use it as an application. 
Mplayer itself use LibMPEG2 to play MPEG2 stream and use other 
libraries for other formats and codecs (as FFMPEG, XVID, etc).

Unfortunately, I will not add LibMPEG2 to GEM. In fact I'll not use 
PD/GEM at all for the big project I'm working on. Maybe I'm crazy but 
the problem is that PD is not multithreaded and work with CPU time and 
not real time. So if you try in Gem to do something as simple as 
rotating a square on the screen, it will not rotate regularly. It will 
stall from time to time. And if you try to load a big texture 
(1024x1024) the rotation of the square will stall even more badly. And 
I don't think there's something I can do ? I tried to preload some big 
textures with pix_buffer but when I display the image it's sucking a 
lot of CPU. When I say a lot I mean a lot. The more your texture is big 
the more CPU it's suck. It's very strange. I don't understand why? 
Anyway, in the mid-term it's not an option for me to preload the 
images. So now I'm doing the project in Python with pyOpenGL. This way 
I can schedule redraw in real time, not cpu time, and open my textures 
in a thread. This way everything play smoothly. But I have a lot more 
to code ! I wish I could done it with PD/GEM but it's not possible.

One last note:
for FFMEPG in Gem, I did try so many things but in the end it never 
worked. I always have the -2 error meaning that there's an I/O problem?

Anyway thanks for your good work to all the developers of PD and Gem !

Etienne