My replies to various comments to the list (I have been on a training course
the last couple of days):

My main interest is making sure I can use any format I want in any of the
tools that will be designed.
I have been collecting format specification documents for a while now and am
more than happy to help in that area.


> > On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 23:25:21 +0100, Martin Kuball
> > <MartinKuball at web.de>  wrote:
> >
> >> IMHO Squeak already has a lot of things we can use. But they need to
> >> be better integrated, polished up a little bit and bundled with some
> >> nice interface classes.
> >
> >
> > That's my feeling, too.
> 
> Yes, but maybe more than polished. Some things just don't work.. or they
> work on some platforms and not on others. Or, they are not clean objects
> to build on.
> 
> At the very least, it'd be great to get these
> fixed/polished/bundled/interfaced/documented to use. That would open up
> for more enhancements by others.  I'd like to make Squeak more
> attractive to other audio/video developers, too.

Exactly!! ImageReadWriter and subclasses are great but don't go far enough
(IMHO). The audio classes are half done (some work really well and some
really don't). If you want to add another file format type you might have to
write a BUNCH of methods in lots of classes to integrate it.
We need to come up with a framework that allows a new format to be EASILY
added. i.e. registration, read from stream, write to stream, etc.

BTW I have a vision of a framework, not the details so much as how I would
like it to work. I will write it up soon. I fly to Malaysia on Sunday for a
couple of weeks so I should have lots of time in the hotel :)

Cees said:
> Good. As a hobbyist photographer (I think stills are part of multimedia as
> well) and musicist I welcome any enhancement in that area (one of my todo
> list entries shows a media database - I want to replace iTunes *and* my
> photo db software with Squeak ;)).

One of my dreams is to have Squeak be my music/video/photo database. That is
why things like metadata and containers are important for me. i.e EXIF in
JPEG

Yoshiki Said:
>  My interest so far is rather specific.  Adding MPEG4 to Squeak,

>  * It should handle multiple (network and file) streams.
>  * It should reasonably portable.

>  My thought now is to write an equivalent of mp4player in Squeak, and call
MPEG4IP library as plugin.

>  I haven't looked at OGG thing, but possibly the higher level abstraction
can use it...

The OGG stuff is sorted, it needs better integration with sound classes and
usability methods but the core works. I stopped there because when I came to
actually play the sounds, the audio classes did my head in!! And this was
AFTER figuring out how to port something where I didn't really understand
the underlying math! ;)

I will make my feelings about plugins clear for the last time (cause no one
like a nagger :).  I see plugins as a necessary evil. Yes they speed things
up but they ALSO reduce portability. I would love to see a "pure" smalltalk
implementation of all A/V classes with plugins used to speed up parts that
are required. That way the base is portable to any machine, it might not be
fast but it will work.

If we make the assumption that the A/V framework will rely on binary
streams, we separate the transport layer from the encoding/decoding layer
(which should be separate from the presentation layer).
Something like: Stream<->Codec<->Tools

Russell