[pygame] SDL_ffmpeg vs ffmpeg

[Tyler Laing <trinioler@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

I've been looking at SDL_ffmpeg and ffmpeg. 

There are some considerations for choosing each. SDL_ffmpeg is fairly simple to interact with, load, play, pause a movie. You can interact with each frame, and so on. However, SDL_ffmpeg converts every frame from YUV to RGB, to make it easier on the programmers to use image manipulation functions and so on. This is a performance hit, for sure. Considering Python's reputation already for being slow, having a movie module take that kind of hit will result in a further stain to the reputation, when sometimes, rarely, movies stutter or pause when they shouldn't. It can take a long time to recover from a negative reputation.

For ffmpeg, it offers much the same capability, but without the SDL conveniences. It does offer far more capability with movie files than SDL_ffmpeg does though. I think, but I'm not sure, that the pygame surfaces do not need to have the frames of the movie be in YUV format? Or its a quick operation to convert the surface for YUV then back to RGB. Something like that, correct me if I'm wrong. So we don't need every frame to be converted to RGB, except when we do need it.

If I went with ffmpeg, I was considering a design where we explicitly convert the movie from YUV to RGB, with a simple convert function. From the point its called, to the point it is called again, the movie is in RGB format. It fits with the python philosophy that "Explicit is better than implicit." (-The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters)

Personally, I would prefer to work with ffmpeg, because of the greater functionality, and the lack of conversion performance hit. 

-Tyler 

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