Helping Out W/ Programming

[gigabeatbox]

Hi, I want to help out with Rockbox, and hopefully getting video to work, but all I know is QBASIC and a little bit of Visual...Can I do any work for Rockbox with this knowledge? I doubt I can, but I thought it would be worth asking, because how cool would it be to say to your friends: Oh yeah, BTW, I helped put video on my MP3 player last night...ok so that would be sorta lame, but seriously, everybody wants to have video (or a lot of people anyways) and I'm definetely one of those people, but I don't want to be the one who complains about how long it's taking while sitting back in my computer chair playing computer games..

[linuxstb]

You won't be able to avoid using C if you want to implement video playback in Rockbox - Rockbox itself is written in C, and whichever video codec(s) you try and port will more likely than not also be in C.  Assembly-language optimisations will no doubt also be required - but they can be done by anyone once the initial port has been done.

You don't need a player capable of running Rockbox in order to start programming it - for high-level tasks like video playback, you can just use the UI simulator and start learning...

[gigabeatbox]

So how exactly would I go about doing that?

[Bagder]

1. Get Rockbox source code and build a simulator

2. Get an open source video codec source code.

3. Port the codec to Rockbox. Don't use floats.

Seriously, if you need to ask these questions you should probably consider a simpler task.

[gigabeatbox]

You don't exactly get what I meant, or maybe I just didn't phrase it properly. I think it would be cool to help out w/ rockbox, and what i meant about the video was that it would be cool that once I learned more about programming and rockbox, it would be cool to be able to help...i'm not saying i want people to tell me how to put video on my mp3 player, i'm just sayin that it would be cool if someone could tell me somewhere to start off...do u get wat im saying? a simpler task would be awesome...like i said, i'm not trying to put video on my gigabeat right now, i just want somewhere to start off. well reply if you can>..

[Bagder]

It's generally considered a neat starting-point to write a plugin as a first task to enter the world of Rockbox development:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DevelopmentGuide

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/HowtoWritePlugins