[Qt-interest] Adding support for a new video format

[Oliver.Knoll at comit.ch]

Fred Bacon wrote on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 5:39 PM:

>> ...
>> The Phonon backends will try to open your files using the codecs
>> already present on your OS. ...
>> ...
> Okay, so how exactly do I add a new codec?  This is a really simple
> format.

I have never used Phonon programatically, I am merely a video "user" (Adobe Premiere, x.264, VirtualDub, ffdshow, ...) and know things about "video codecs" only from an end-user point of view. So I don't know exactly where/how Phonon detects available codec plugins.

But "using the codecs  already present on your OS" means that installing such codecs is a highly platform/framework-dependent way: For Windows you would look for something like "How to install codecs for Video For Windows", or "DirectShow filter". On Mac OS X I strongly guess you would "register" your codec using the QuickTime framework. On Unix/Linux a good guess would probably be something like "Video4Linux".

So while your given format might be very simple, the tricky part is off course making your platform/multimedia framework  aware of your codec plugin.

This might be a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows (it even contains some sample code for a VfW skeleton ;)

It also leads to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectShow

Also noteworthy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffdshow - it makes several codecs (such as x.264, a h264 implementation) available as DirectShow filters.


Cheers, Oliver
--
Oliver Knoll
Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH
COMIT AG - ++41 79 520 95 22