Re: [pygame] Movie module information

[Brian Fisher <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:42 AM, Marcus von Appen <mva@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On, Sun Apr 26, 2009, Tyler Laing wrote:
> One of the first steps I need to take for the GSoC project is to get user
> stories so I can build acceptance tests.
>

Well the conventional and simple story would be simply playing movies as part of a game. Specifically playing a logo movie before a game or while it loads (like say the xbox logo when it boots, or thq thing for movies, or whatever animated little game logo the developer made), meaning the api would let the programmer kick of playing of a movie, and know when it's done, and I think that's an absolute minimum. The other common conventional thing is cut scenes - so inbetween levels of a game playing a movie. Same fundamental requirements as above, but also In this case, it's highly desirable to have the transition in and out of the movie be as seamless as possible - specifically popping up additional windows and changing screen resolution is much much worse than it playing in the same window without changing resolutions - also for openGL using games, it's very important that the end result on stuff in video memory is predictable and well known for a particular set of code - on windows for instance, resolution swaps usually wipe your textures - meaning the video module should not decide to change resolutions based on local conditions, but if it does, it ought to let the programmer know somehow if it did so.






> I want to hear what you guys(the users) want out of an updated movie module.
> What do you want to be able to do, and how?

Here's my wish list:

 * format support (avi, mpeg, etc...)
 * seperate stream manipulation and handling, if possible
  - mute, play, stop, rewind for audio and video streams
    within the main stream of the video file.
 * simple(!) video handling

stories and acceptance tests sounds like extreme programming terms, and in the spirit of extreme programming, I think that list wish list would get changed quite a lot. (in particular, who's the customer, and what features would actually get used by that customer)

format support is great of course - but which ones are important? AVI is a bitch to support because it's just a container for any crazy stream encoding. I would think that a better way to define format support would be to say what particular program's outputs should be supported (i.e. what formats is the customer going to get their content actually created in). Given the open-source focus of pygame and such, I imagine supporting the most popular output formats of Blender would be great (I don't know what they). Supporting the latest Theora encoded files would also be a good thing (it's what I'd want to use)

For separate streams, I can see selectively picking streams and having streams well synchronized as useful things for games, but rewind seems like not something a game would ever actually want to do. Seek to a specific point in the video however, would be something that could be quite useful.

So what's simple video handling? How would whatever that is be used in a game, sepcifically.