[SDL] Movie playback and SDL

[Sami Näätänen]

On Thursday 21 November 2002 21:25, Robert Diel wrote:
> I have an animation, that's about 40 bmps full screen, 800x600x32, and
> yes it's really big, but I'm also frame limiting playback to 50fps, and
> it's definitely running something close to that.  I haven't put an FPS
> counter in, but visually it looks much faster then the After Effects
> preview, going at 30 fps.  The problem is exactly the one you are
> pointing out, it's just way too BIG.  it would be nice if I could
> compress this animation into something a bit more useful, but the
> compression needs to be close to lossless, otherwise the playback looks
> rather bad.  I mean I wouldn't mind like 10-15meg per second for a
> fullscreen animation, but right now its looking a lot closer to 40.  the
> biggest problem is this animation, much like a video, doesn't really
> have any elements that I can easily split up and animate separately on
> like some kind of set background, so i was hoping to throw out the
> middle man and compress it as some sort of near lossless video and play
> that back through SDL.
> For BMPs decompression isn't a concern, I have another animation, that's
> about 36 PNG frames, a bit less then a sec.  I pre-load this animation
> into memory.  It runs rather quickly, but I know I'll start running into
> memory constraints rather soon and need to put together some kind of
> memory caching to load and unload images as needed.  Again, I was hoping
> to avoid this by finding some kind of video format that I could read and
> display on the fly, so that all this could be avoided.

Check for MPEG4IP. It comes with modified SDL. It makes MP4 movies and 
includes encoding and decoding exaples.