playing a video clip

colin9876 · #1 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 02:04 AM

For my new quiz game is it possible to play video clip files from a basic4ppc program?
If so which format is best for the clip? (h.264 ??)

alfcen · #2 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 02:37 AM

Actually this interests me, too. There is no function native to Basic4ppc
that would allow playing video in, say, an image control or so.
This will require a wrapper library for the Media Player or third party
video players.

An alternative is flash video which can be replayed with agraham's or
dzt's web browser libraries. There are utilities around that convert video
formats to flash (CoffeeCup - HTML Editor, Flash & Web Design Software) or google for more.

colin9876 · #3 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 02:58 AM

video file formats are in an annoying mess at the moment as apple support some types that Window Media player wont recognise with out extra codecs,

I couldnt believe that Vista Professional with Media centre still cant play a simple AVI or MP4 film!

It would be great to write our own library to open a film file and play it? Still it would be very CPU intensive so probably would have to be written in C, unless anyoine knows if the .NET librarys include such a function already?

Update - as a test I used Sports shot mode in my camera to take 30 sequential jpegs a fraction of a second apart. Written a B4ppc program to cycle them back in an image box and can get about 3 frames a second if it displays the jpeg on say half the screen! Its not quite movie quality lol!

alfcen · #4 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 04:43 AM

Exactly, that's why I stay with flash video. Here is a free converter:
Free Video to Flash Converter: convert video to flv swf flash
Works great with the browser libraries

colin9876 · #5 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 07:53 AM

wow coverted an avi and its shrunk to less than half the storage and it plays fine on my pc.
copied the file across to my device - what application do I have to use to play this flv file??

alfcen · #6 (**permalink**) 05-20-2008, 08:18 AM

Flash files, preferrably .swf, must be embedded in HTML which the webbrowser.dll will be able to load. The HTML code is something like this

Code:

<html>
<body leftmargin='0' topmargin='0' bgcolor='#003863'>
<br />
<object classid='clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000' width='100%' height='100%'>
<param name='movie' value='myshow.swf' />
<param name='quality' value='high' />
<param name=bgcolor value="#003863" />
<embed src='myshow.swf' bgcolor='#003863' width='100%' height='100%' quality='high'></embed>
</object>
</body>
</html>

Play with the width and height parameters if need be.
The converter utility also recommends HTML code for playing in a web browser.