An ffmpeg and SDL Tutorial

What now?

So we have a working player, but it's certainly not as nice as it could be. We did a lot of handwaving, and there are a lot of other features we could add:

• Error handling. The error handling in our code is abysmal, and could be handled a lot better.
• Pausing. We can't pause the movie, which is admittedly a useful feature. We can do this by making use of an internal paused variable in our big struct that we set when the user pauses. Then our audio, video, and decode threads check for it so they don't output anything. We also use av_read_play for network support. It's pretty simple to explain, but it's not obvious to figure out for yourself, so consider this homework if you want to try more. For hints, check out ffplay.c.
• Support for video hardware. For a sample of setting this up, check out the Frame Grabbing section in Martin's old tutorial.
• Seeking by bytes. If you calculate the seek position by bytes instead of seconds, it is more accurate on video files that have discontiguous timestamps, like VOB files.
• Frame dropping. If the video falls too far behind, we should drop the next frame instead of setting a short refresh.
• Network support. This video player can't play network streaming video.
• Support for raw video like YUV files. There are some options we have to set if our player is to support raw video like YUV files, as we cannot guess the size or time_base.
• Fullscreen
• Various options, e.g. different pic formats; see ffplay.c for all the command line switches.
• Other hand-wavy things; for example, the audio buffer in our struct should be declared aligned.

Well, I hope this tutorial was instructive and fun. If you have any suggestions, bugs, complaints, accolades, etc., please email me at dranger at gmail dot com.

Links:
ffmpeg home page
Martin Bohme's original tutorial
libSDL
SDL Documentation