Improving Squeak's Mutlimedia

Brad Fuller brad at sonaural.com
Sat Feb 19 18:50:52 UTC 2005


Thanks for the reply and interest, Martin. See below

Martin Kuball wrote:

>Am Friday 18 February 2005 21:09 schrieb Brad Fuller:
>  
>
>>Is anyone interested in improving the multimedia facilities in
>>Squeak?
>><snip>
>>    
>>
>I'm definitely interested. Unfortunately I'm not very good in writing 
>long Mails. I will try to sum up my plans and ideas in the next 
>couple of days. But here are some remarks  that come to my mind when 
>reading your EMail.
>
>What is Multimedia? Certainly it includes Audio and Video. But I think 
>there is more.
>  
>
Yeah, I didn't really explain, kinda vague.
I'm referring to only realtime full-motion video and sound/music only. I 
wasn't refering to static graphics, text, etc.  The rest seems to be 
addressed well by others. To me, both audio and video are in need of 
more attention.

>There are different levels or types of multimedia software. One type 
>is concerned with the creation of new content. Another type deals 
>with the manipulation of existing content. I think my AudioVideoLib 
>ist an example for the latter type. Playback another.
>  
>
Right. I think we could view this in layers:
* Low-level: Most of what is in the VM that addresses the platform-specific.
* Mid-level: Fundamental classes that connect to the VM and provide 
fundamental
   facilities for upper level "apps". This could probably be divided 
into two.
* Upper-level: Applications for users - creation of content (like vegas, 
premiere,
   sound forge, protools) playback of content (like windows media 
player, xmms) that make
   use of the fundamental classes.

(Perhaps it is not as clean a line as described here. But, if I remember 
correctly, the sound recorder and sound playback are intertwined a bit 
and several things are hard-coded (like sample-rate) that would be 
better as a setting for the user. The fundamental recording/playback 
should be separate from the user audio application. A while back, I've 
pulled these apart and also made the AIF/WAV file access classes more 
general. But, it was more for just my use and would like to make it more 
general for the image. Don't hold me to this explanatin as the current 
state as I'm writing this from memory of 6 months ago -- written here 
purely for explanation.)

Approaching the problems could be addressed in layers, as well. Perhaps 
there are volunteers that would like to work on the VM some that work on 
the fundamental classes, etc.

>At the moment I'm trying to finish some missing parts of the AVI stuff 
>and make everything more robust. Another important point is to really 
>put it to use and find out the limits of what you can do with it 
>(speed wise I mean) and to improve the API.
>  
>
that could be helpful for many.

>By the way I'm really excited about the things going on here at the 
>moment. I hope we can move squeak to a new level in the next few 
>month.
>
>Martin
>  
>
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