[PD] pd extended build environment

IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig at iem.at
Thu Apr 17 09:33:39 CEST 2008


Joseph Barrows wrote:
> hi,
> i am having trouble with GEM, it only reads .MOV and only some of those 
> (has to be motion jpeg, but still not all of them open)
> apparently GEM video support is defined at compile time, so i was 
> wondering what libraries are used in the sourceforge build environment.

none, as Gem (and Pd) do not use the sourceforge build farm, but hans 
has set up his own.


anyhow, are you trying to build Gem yourself or are you just using 
pre-packed binaries (e.g. Pd-extended); it's not clear to me though your 
email suggests the latter.

anyhow, Gem uses several APIs to decode video; which APIs it can read is 
defined at compile time as you have corretly guessed.

which APIs are actually found at compile time can be seen in the output 
of Gem's configure (which is part of the build-logs to be found on the 
autobuid website where you downloaded the Pd-extended package)

the build-logs for gutsy on 2008-04-16 show:
   video-support
     use mpeg             : yes
     use mpeg-3           : yes
     use QuickTime        : yes
     use aviplay          : yes
     use ffmpeg           : no (forced)

so there are 4 APIs used;
you should also see something similar when you first instantiate a 
[pix_film] or [pix_movie] object.
(e.g. on my machine it says:
  pix_film:: quicktime support
  pix_film:: libmpeg3 support
  pix_film:: libaviplay support
  pix_film:: FFMPEG support
which tells me that i use other APIs than the autobuild versions (e.g. i 
have ffmpeg support))


"mpeg" and "mpeg-3" are just able to decode mpeg-file, which you don't 
seem to care about right now.
the funnier parts are quicktime and aviplay; these APIs both support a 
number of codecs depending on how they were compiled and/or which codecs 
they find on your harddisk.
(i think libquicktime have changed their policy to just include built-in 
codecs; whereas aviplay uses external codecs)

so the key thing to do to get more movies to load is to either update 
these libraries or install (or update) packages that provide codecs.

on debian, one beloved package used to be "avifile-win32-plugin" from 
debian-multimedia-org, which would provide a number of non-free 
(potentially copyright and/or patent protected) codecs as w32-dlls.

i don't know whether there is this package for ubuntu (or whether you 
can "just use" the debian-multimedia packages)


due to the potentially illegal nature of some codec packages available 
in the net, these packages vanish from time to time.



fmgasd
IOhannes




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