Showing videos in an OS

[rdos]

Porting image tools (like JPEG and PNG) was relatively easy, but I would also want to be able to create videos on Windows that can be played on my OS. Are there any useful open source projects that have relatively portable video players that are not dependent on hardware accelerators and GPUs? I have audio drivers, but players that only have image content are interesting too.

[klange]

ffmpeg has a considerable collection of software codecs that are usable for live playback, with libavcodec (not to be confused with the short-lived "libav" fork of ffmpeg, which is a very confusing mess of politics from the past I'd prefer not to remember). I had a little video player for ToaruOS a long time ago that used it, though my performance wasn't great back then (but don't worry, it was all my fault).

[mid]

ffmpeg is definitely the best option in terms of features, but I think we can all agree that it's API is the eighth circle of hell (namely the lack of documentation, bad examples, outdated third-party guides, etc). If you end up giving up on it, consider something more scaled back like a combination of libwebm, libvpx, libogg to play one specific format.

There's also TheoraPlay which wraps around libogg, libtheora, libvorbis and provides a simpler interface for playing .ogv files.