New feature proposition: How about native video support?

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Wed May 07, 2008 11:45 am

For example to display intro videos, endings something like that. Also, i read somewhere that video blending was a feature which could be done in pixel shader 3. So, why not include a feature like this in a native way?

perhaps support for XVid or OGG Theora videos.

Congratulations, the engine is SUPPERB.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Wed May 07, 2008 1:21 pm

Because of the lack of cross-platform video libraries. Moreover, this would be an external add-on, due to the additional library requirements. That's not a prohibitor, though, so if someone comes up with a cross-platform solution I guess the IrrExt project won't reject it.
If you need a solution for only one platform you can search the forum for various implementations.

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Wed May 07, 2008 2:47 pm

Look for Acki's IAVIPlayer (from his Irr-extension).

Zeuss · Post by **Zeuss** » Wed May 07, 2008 11:53 pm

This does sound like a viable IrrExt,

Probably something supporting mkv's in x264 format (audio I am a little unclear on, probably ogg but Irrlicht has no native audio as we all know). With mkv's and x264 both open source formats, and x264 has libaries for everything it could be done cross platform quite happily.

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Thu May 08, 2008 8:15 am

Because of "crossplatforming" i thought those codecs would be good enough. They're free (gpl), if i'm no mistaken,anyway, i'm still a bit "noob" to the engine, and i'm not very used to it.

killthesand · Post by **killthesand** » Sat May 10, 2008 4:11 am

How ridiculous a task would it be to load video as a texture? Have a movie playing on 3d polygons...

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sat May 10, 2008 9:21 pm

Uhm, how would you present a video in Irrlicht?

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Tue May 13, 2008 3:52 pm

killthesand wrote:How ridiculous a task would it be to load video as a texture? Have a movie playing on 3d polygons...

Its been done before, infact I came quite close to having a full-on video manipulation app with a video texture on a wall, I was able to fast forward and fast-rewind the video with sound. This was done using one of the video texture add-ons in the FAQ forum. (Yes there is more than one.)

On a slightly unrelated note, webcam support is quite trivial, you just need to lock the texture, copy the pixels over from your webcam librarie's output (eg OpenCV) and unlock() the texture. This is the same method used for videos, getting the actual data into Irrlicht is the easy part, you just need to handle your own decoding.

killthesand · Post by **killthesand** » Wed May 14, 2008 3:24 am

you just need to handle your own decoding.

I tried a couple of video loaders from the forum and didn't have much success, so I decided to make my own. I'm using libavformat and libavcodec so it should be cross platform, although I've only tested it on windowsXP. (Hooray Fedora 9 came out today!)

Here is source code and a windows demo of a 2d video player, and a video loaded as a texture. http://mihd.net/p41qiwm

Getting the libraries to link is a pain! Here is an amazing resource: http://arrozcru.no-ip.org/ffmpeg_wiki/tiki-index.php
Following that tutorial, I couldn't get automake to compile so I left the old version alone. I needed to update m4 before I could update Autoconf.

Watch out what libraries you use because your license can quickly switch from lgpl, to gpl, to illegal.

http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.html has nice tutorials for using the libraries.

killthesand · Post by **killthesand** » Sat May 31, 2008 5:42 pm

Now that proper Nvidia drivers for Fedora 9 have been released, I've made a couple small changes to the video loader to make it work with OpenGL. (It does seems to run much faster with the software renderer.)

Download source and test avi here: http://mihd.net/80qklit

This needs to be linked with the following libraries
Irrlicht
GL
X11
Xext
Xxf86vm
z
m
avutil
avformat
avcodec
swscale