Reinventing the wheel

polus · 10-04-2005, 06:47 AM

Carputers seem pretty cool so I thought Ill write one in C++ for windows (wanted to do it in linux but not developed anything with a GUI in linux :/

Anyway im at the stage where I need to add audio and video into the project.

What do people use?

Alot of these apps seem to be written in vb presumably with activeX or other libarries containing video/audio components.

Can anyone point me in the correct direction to sutible components?

Thanks

PURDooM · 10-04-2005, 07:18 AM

Rob Withey · 10-04-2005, 07:59 AM

I'm using DirectShow for mine.

IntellaWorks · 10-04-2005, 08:15 AM

I use: Media player 10, in the .net envirnment for audio/video
You could use: Fmod, winamp or directx

polus · 10-04-2005, 08:43 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by PURDooM

Quote:

IntellaWorks I use: Media player 10, in the .net envirnment for audio/video
You could use: Fmod, winamp or directx

Rob Withey I'm using DirectShow for mine.

Thanks guys. I did think of media player. Id not heard of Fmod. Hmm ill have a think

IntellaWorks · 10-04-2005, 08:56 AM

Fmod is used in a lot of video games. To be honest it would be pretty cool to see in a frontend because of the ability to control audio channels and streams.

For example, if your thinking about voice recogition, you could have the audio lower itself on the passenger front/rear and driver rear speakers and stop on the driver front.

Or for text-to-Speech do the same kind of thing. You could easily fade in and out of audio as well as cross fade songs.

Fmod also runs WAY cheaper (cpu cycles) than winamp or WMP (Wmp being the worst of them all)

MatrixPC · 10-04-2005, 09:08 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by IntellaWorks

Fmod also runs WAY cheaper (cpu cycles) than winamp or WMP (Wmp being the worst of them all)

This is true, but if you have visualization On, winamp will rape the CPU badly compare to wmp.

TheLlama · 10-04-2005, 09:30 AM

I use fmod for my Linux player. Fmod is very powerful and easy to use. Plus, its very easy to add filters (EQ, effects, etc..) and spectrum/waveform analyzer. My friend, who doesn't subscribe to this forum, uses mplayer for all of his audio and video. His frontend runs in Linux also.

polus · 10-04-2005, 11:30 AM

Thanks again!

Thats great guys exactly what I wanted to know.

TheLlama: Have you got any pics of your software in action? I would like to use Freebsd as I could cut a distro down and produce a more custom app but I work with windows (developing industrial control software) so I find it easier and faster to get things implemented...

IntellaWorks, I did want speech reconition and Fmod seems versatile and efficient! /me runs off to play with fmod

polus · 10-04-2005, 11:37 AM

OMG how cool is fmod!

Got an example working already, the documenation is excellant!

IntellaWorks · 10-04-2005, 11:38 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by MatrixPC

This is true, but if you have visualization On, winamp will rape the CPU badly compare to wmp.

I forgot about that, I guess it makes sense though. Good catch!

IntellaWorks · 10-04-2005, 11:39 AM

What's your take so far?? post some examples here (for poeple in the future)

polus · 10-04-2005, 11:58 AM

My Take?

I can post the class ive done, but when you download the Fmod API there are loads of really good installed in "blah...\FMOD SoundSystem\FMOD Programmers API\examples" (on windows).

TheLlama · 10-04-2005, 03:42 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by polus

TheLlama: Have you got any pics of your software in action?

Well, my player is in limbo at the moment. I'm rewriting the player from scratch since my toolkit has changed a bit over the last month. I can show you a few old pictures of the toolkit in action, however. The shots show a simple demo application running in both X and on a VFD. The demo is actually using FMOD to play the song entered in the textbox.

This is the demo running in X11. The widgets all respond to user input, textboxes have blinking carets, just about everything you'd expect. I use sigc++ for typesafe call backs on widgets that emit signals. All they programmer needs to do is construct a screen and setup the widgets. Then, they just need to post events to the LTKSystem class. The LTKSystem does all the hard work. The programmer has complete control over the processing loop, in fact, the gui doesn't even need to loop.

By changing the implementation of the Screen from XScreen to VFDScreen the demo will run on a VFD too. Of course, we need to get input from the console instead of X, but that is trivial. The picture does not do the screen justice, but notice how the widgets are automatically drawn in black and white. LTK provides a simple mechinism for adding hotkeys to a form. This is essencial for systems without a pointing device. Both of these demos show the widgets using the built in theme. A theme engine has been designed but not implemented. This will allow applications to have a distinct look and feel. I can show you a class diagram of the whole gui system, but I don't think anyone would care.

Oh well, thats enough of that. I guess I've been doing a bit of wheel reinventing, myself. It doesn't look like much but it is well over 5000 lines right now. I better get to work so I can have more to show off.

polus · 10-04-2005, 05:13 PM

Quote:

I can show you a class diagram of the whole gui system, but I don't think anyone would care.

I would !

You can email it to me or post it here.

Well I got my audio class to a resonable standard. I had to make it multithreaded but apart from that its pretty straight forward. I rekon another couple of days and the Mp3 playing side of it will be done, yay!

I would be interested in contributing but Im not sure I have the time :/

Do you plan on adding SatNav to your app? This was the only app I could find http://gpsdrive.kraftvoll.at/docu.shtml