I hate them. No seriously. They are terrible. In fact, I’ll go further and say that dealing with video programatically through C++ has plagued me for almost a decade now. The scenario is this: I’ve recorded some video from one of my experiments and now I want to post-process it and overlay some visualizations on it, so I need a program to read it in. I was using OpenCV with Visual C++ 2008, which includes ffmpeg, but it crapped out on me with an nice error message:<\/p>\n
Compiler did not align stack variables. Libavcodec has been miscompiled and may be very slow or crash. This is not a bug in libavcodec, but in the compiler. You may try recompiling using gcc >= 4.2. Do not report crashes to FFmpeg developers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yeah nice. Plus, OpenCV’s video support via ffmpeg doesn’t support 64-bit programs. I messed around with recompiling with different options and doing some quick web-searching, but didn’t find any easy solutions. So what to do? Well I could go directly to Microsoft’s solution of DirectShow via DirectX but that requires an insane amount of setup and often times the DirectX SDK doesn’t even compile cleanly with the latest versions of Visual Studio. I remembered I had solved this problem years ago in my time at Robotics Lab @ UCF by compiling all the DirectX stuff into a DLL so you could just include the header file and go. So I dug that up and compiled it just fine, but then it crashed because it was compiled with Visual C++ 2005 runtime DLLs. And of course you can’t mix & match. I wasn’t about to recompile from source because that meant setting up DirectX SDK.<\/p>\n
So I had heard good things about ffmpeg and\/or gstreamer as being generic video libraries with lots and lots of codes available. But unfortunately, ffmpeg developers are a big slobby about Visual C++ (with good reason since it’s not standards complaint), but it’s a super pain. So after a long arduous journey of like 5 hours, I finally arrived at using gstreamer’s Windows SDK to compile an ffmpeg sample that loaded a video and wrote out the first 5 frames to disk as ppms.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking of creating a generic video server over sockets or shared memory so I never have to compile in the video\u00a0 reading\/writing stuff every again (at least until the binaries break). I don’t know, is there a good Windows Video Library that I’m missing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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