[pygame] State of the Pygame

[Pete Shinners <pete@shinners.org>]

Hey guys, trying to give an update here. It's been a long time since 
Pygame-1.6 was released, and things are quite overdue. At quick glance 
it may seem like Pygame development has stalled, but that isn't quite 
the case.

I've been working on and off for the last 3 months on replacing the 
Pygame Movie and Music backend with libavformat and libavcodec. Progress 
has been good, but not quite good enough.

http://www.pygame.org/ftp/contrib/movieshot.jpg
http://www.pygame.org/ftp/contrib/pygamemovie.jpg

The Movie end is working very well actually, as you can preview from the 
screenshots. The new decoding backend brings a lot of formats to the 
table and works great. Unfortunately there are a few stumbling blocks 
that have made this hard.

First, these ffmpeg libraries have no documentation, and do not offer 
much in the line of example code. They are extremely complex and low 
level. The current stable release is over a year old, the developers all 
claim it is "not good" and recommend cvs snapshots.

Because I've had such a hard time getting it working, there are a few 
features I just can't get implemented. Things like seeking forward, and 
skipping and adjusting to compensate for computers too slow. I consider 
these critical features, at least for replacing the current Movie module 
we have with SMPEG. I'm really hoping someone with ffmpeg coding 
experience can swoop in and make the final changes it will need.

In any event, the time has come to get Pygame-1.7 out the door. I'd like 
to set a target of 6-7 weeks, but that may be a little too quick. If the 
new Movie support can't get any better, it will probably come as an 
unsupported and 'experimental' pygame module for now.

As for the other new features I've got my eyes set on. I have a gigantic 
backlog of patches and bugs on my todo list. We already have a much 
improved sprite module, thanks to the efforts of Joe Wresching. I'll get 
a full list of fixes I'm trying to get ready for 1.7. It may even turn 
out I'll be calling out for assistance on some of the items.

The main things to look forward to will be cleaned up documentation, 
surfarray and sndarray fixes, new advanced overlay objects for video 
support, and several crashing bugfixes like in arc drawing.

More details coming soon. If you are anxious to get ahold of the new 
Movie stuff, it is currently checked into Pygame CVS. You'll have to 
manually enable it in the "Setup" configuration file. Just be aware 
things will be changing.

Anyways, thought I'd share as I'm sure you are all getting curious.