Hi!

Enno Schwass <onkelenno at mac.com> wrote:
> Am 31.10.2006 um 03:04 schrieb Andreas Raab:
> > Hi -
> >
> > Brief question: If one would want to integrate MPEG-4 in Croquet/ 
> > Squeak what would good options look like? Any ideas about available  
> > libraries, pain of interfacing those, etc? In the best of all  
> > worlds an open source solution would of course be preferable but it  
> > would be useful to know and evaluate other alternatives, too.
> 
> The mplayer / mencoder stuff is multiplatform (linux, mac, win) and  
> uses libavcodec, ffmpeg etc. and non native codecs. Look at the  
> source or contact the authors. They will support, I guess. Same for  
> the vlc Project.
> 
> www.mplayerhq.hu
> 
> www.videolan.org
> 
> Hope this helps
> Enno

Adding more info, yes, AFAIK MPlayer and Videolan are the two cross
platform main "player" applications/projects out there that have very
good support for MPEG-4 (which is a very wide area of standard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG4) and lots more.

The movies from OOPSLA were encoded using mencoder (a part of MPlayer to
do command line encoding) btw, 2-pass using the XviD codec:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid
	http://www.xvid.org

...which is one of the MPEG-4 codecs (and compatible with Divx - the
commercial sibling). The best MPEG-4 codec that keeps getting mentioned
(but haven't used myself) is the implementation of MPEG-4 part 10
(called H.264: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264) called x264:

	http://www.videolan.org/x264.html
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264

And the two players mentioned above can AFAIK use XviD, x264, libavcodec
(a whole library of codecs) and many more.

But anyway, I presume you want to hook into the most promising player in
order to be as future proof as possible - and Videolan comes to mind
given its stronger focus on cross platformness (just my feeling).

regards, Göran