Hi!
Sorry for being so silent the last week. Here are some more informations about my current interests and some ideas.
My comitment is to work on a general concept and on the AV-Library project I started. As regards the general concept I would like to discuss the following:
* everything (including the existing classes) should be packaged, right?
* what packages do we want? Few big ones or many smaller ones?
* what categories do we want
* set up a wiki to organize our ideas, resources (links, docs) and examples
* there are a lot of interesting open source multimedia projects that could serve as examples on how to do it right or not. Examples that come to my mind are sndkit and musickit, two objective-c frameworks that seem to be quite mature.
* I would like to compile a list of existing classes and projects which could reuse and what is good and bad and needs to be changed. E.g. Graphics-Files category AbstractSound class SoundRecorder class AIFFFileReader class (should be moved into different category) AudioVideoLibrary packages OGG package etc...
As regards my AV Library I'm about to release a new version. In the next days I will do some profiling and write code to manipulate audio/video sync in an AVI container. And if time permits I want to start work on reading and writing ID3 tags.
In the long term I would like to add mpeg4 playback and mpeg2 handling (a dvd publishing app would be nice to have in squeak).
While working on the AV lib I stumbled across the following two issues that are not strictly multimeda related but my cause us some trouble.
1. There is no buffered filestream in squeak. When reading multimedia stuff you often have to examine each byte. So you do a lot of method calls to get the next byte. That implies a primitive call each time. Not very fast.
2. I think there is a need for OS-Thread support if only to avoid dealing with it in plugins we may want to write. The topic pops up from time to time here but nothing has been done so far, right?
While the first point is easy to solve, the second is definitely not.
Oncy we have concluded on an overall structure there should be no restrictions on what people want to contribute.
And finally to answer one of Brads questions: I don't think we are a team, yet. But we should strive to be one.
Martin