Video playback library?

[John Reiter]

I've recently begun learning ruby (coming from a mainly java world), and
so far I really like it. Now I'm trying to write as much as I can using
ruby so I can get a better feel for the language.

So, I have an upcoming project that will require writing a program that
can do some simple video playback. I would need it to be cross platform
(at least Windows and OS X, which rules out the gstreamer and xine
bindings for ruby that I've seen), and it would need to be able to play
some common video formats like mpeg-1 and avi.

I would love to write this in ruby, but I have been unable to find
anything that looks like it fits my needs. Does anything like this
exist, or am I stuck using JMF?

Thanks!

John

 

[John Joyce]

VLC is a nice cross-platform app, open source, made in C.
It could probably use some Ruby API though...

 

[John Joyce]

Just a guess; the format of the future is a video rendered as a Flash
animation. Then you put the backend in whatever format you want,
and render
on-demand into Flash. That even supports Linux!


Ruby can only be the glue code there. Video playback is >cough< CPU
intensive...

Yep. You could have bindings/API of some sort like the way RMAgick
works for ImageMagick, but the core code is going to be C/C++ every
time for video. Especially cross-platform.

 

[Jonathan Hudson]

VLC is a nice cross-platform app, open source, made in C.
It could probably use some Ruby API though...

And can be remotely controlled programmaticly via its telnet
interface.

-jh

 

[John Reiter]

Just a guess; the format of the future is a video rendered as a Flash
animation. Then you put the backend in whatever format you want, and
render
on-demand into Flash. That even supports Linux!

Unfortunately, Flash isn't going to be an option for this particular
project.

Ruby can only be the glue code there. Video playback is >cough< CPU
intensive...

Oh, I realize. I was hoping for a cross-platform version of something
like the gstreamer or xine bindings I had seen, just a ruby API on top
of C/C++ code.

 

[John Reiter]

And can be remotely controlled programmaticly via its telnet
interface.

That might be something worth looking into. Thanks!

John

 

[John Joyce]

That might be something worth looking into. Thanks!

John

VLC (videolan.org) is very cool, quite good.
Has python bindings, so Ruby bindings should be doable!