AVI playback

[Taslow]

Is anybody out there working on an AVI playback plugin? I have a large base of avi's and this 'ole machine I'm using starts to smoke when I convert more than one at a time to mpg.

Timeframe? Or does one exist and I somehow can't find it?

thanks!

[Llorean]

1) You'd have to convert them anyway, because they need to be resized. The players aren't fast enough to play or resize full size video.
2) AVI is not a format, it's a container. It can have a very, very wide range of things inside of it, many different possible video codecs.

[Taslow]

Oh...huh, I always thought AVI was another format, just like MPG or MOV files. Do you happen (or anybody out there) happen to know where I can read a good beginner's tutorial on movies and movie formats?

[LambdaCalculus]

Google and Wikipedia are your friends here.

[dkarma]

a very informative reference site can be found at http://www.videohelp.com/
lots of beginner help and conversion information regarding video files.

[hoffster12]

thanks for all the sites, this is really interesting stuff...

[cpchan]

Oh...huh, I always thought AVI was another format, just like MPG or MOV files.

They are all container formats. However, mpeg can only contain mpeg1/2 videos. Where as MOV (QuicikTime) can use a number of codecs. Technically AVI allows you use any codec you want as long as the encoding software supports it- whether you will be able to play  files with non-standard codecs is dependent on the player you use.

Charles

[grossaffe]

i just want an mp4 player, great quality with minimal space.  unfortunately, i'm not fluent in C nor do i know the first thing about coding media players, so i'll just sit back and enjoy the things rockbox developers do come out with.

[Chronon]

If you're talking about h.264 or AVC, then this will not be feasible on the current targets.

[grossaffe]

i was thinking more along the lines of DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4

[safetydan]

Those are also not going to happen on most targets. Way too CPU intensive.

[Llorean]

You really have a choice:

Speed
Filesize
Quality.

You get two of the three. With MPEG2 you can sacrifice filesize and possibly a bit of speed for quality. With MPEG-4 codecs you can't really sacrifice anything to gain back the speed you lose from it being more complex.

[markun]

If you're talking about h.264 or AVC, then this will not be feasible on the current targets.

i was thinking more along the lines of DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4

h.264/AVC is part of MEPG-4 (part 10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

But I guess you are talking about support for MPEG-4 part 2:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2

[grossaffe]

i wasn't talking about the mp4 container, i was talking about the mpeg-4 option within the container.  but either way, i guess its too hardware intensive.  oh well, one can dream... or i guess i could also upgrade to a view... after it gets a rockbox port

[cpchan]

i was thinking more along the lines of DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4

DivX and XviD are MPEG4 implementations.

Those are also not going to happen on most targets. Way too CPU intensive.

I guess the Gigabeat is the only target with enough horse power to decode it in software. However, I believe there might be some targets with DIVX/XVID hardware decoding- it might be feasable on these, but the hardware needs to be figured out.

Charles


Charles