I am writing a certain project and would like to know if anyone here had expereince working with Video\Animation files such as AVI,MOV,MPG,FLI, etc? By writing I mean to the viewer point of view (not editing or building) and using the algorithm and NOT Direct-x or similar libraries. Which files are more comfortable to work with and how complex is the task? Also, could you refer me to useful sources of information? thanks.

Looking again I see that I wasn''t clear,
by saying "from the viewer point of view" I meant programming a viewer and not the viewer himself.

I asked if anyone had experience programming a viewer to one of the formats, how hard it is and which format is best to work with?

Thanks again.

I think you can cross out MOV and FLI... though I could be wrong there. The easiest viewer to write is for AVI files. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video formats have a higher quality than AVI in general, and are often smaller, but are slower to decode than most AVI codecs as far as I know. You can use DirectShow to decode them - but you didn''t want to do that, so I guess MPEG is out unless you want to write your own decoder (I don''t think you want to do this). As far as AVI, the Cinepak codec by Radius is generally the best one to go for as far as quality and size, though the Indeo codec by Intel is good for some things. Indeo is also more CPU intensive in the decoding stage, but you shouldn''t have a problem with either on any modern machine, providing the video isn''t too big. To decompress AVIs, have a look at the ICDecompress etc. functions in the Win32 API. Check out the AVI overview at http://tnir.mef.org/~rae/avi.html for more information. This document goes into a lot of depth about AVIs and even a little information on MPEG and other compression formats. My opinion is that if you just want to write a simple program, I suggest you use AVI, but if you need the optimum quality then you may need to go with MPEG.

Regards

Starfall

.MOV -> not so easy, and Apple proprietary format

.FLI/.FLC -> Very easy do write a decoder for, but it dows not compress well and it is only 8-bit color

.AVI -> uncompressed ones and RLE compressed ones should be easy, the rest is not.

MPEG -> Pretty hard to write it yourself. Could take you a month or two. But, there are two player source trees that are useful for building your own MPEG video player around: the Berkeley mpeg_play code, and the SMPEG code (based on the berkeley code). If you work wth Watcom/DOS I have a precompiled version.

DaBit.

AVI is pretty simple (there''s many Windows interfaces to decode any codec very simply). In fact, there''s an article in the feature articles section describing one way to do it.

Does anyone know what the restrictions are on MPEG decoders? From what I''ve seen, it''s pretty strict, but I''m not 100% sure what exactly is covered. I know that DVD sales and hire pay royalties, but I have no idea what the deal is with software.

Regards

Starfall