I'm encoding images as video using FFmpeg using custom C code rather than linux commands because I am developing the code for an embedded system.
I am currently following through the first dranger tutorial and the code provided in the following question.
How to encode a video from several images generated in a C++ program without writing the separate frame images to disk?
I have found some "less abstract" code in the following github location.
https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/doc/examples/encode_video.c
And I plan to use it as well.
My end goal is simply to save video on an embedded system using embedded C source code, and I am coming up the curve too slowly. So in summary my question is, Does it seem like I am following the correct path here? I know that my system does not come with hardware for video codec conversion, which means I need to do it with software, but I am unsure if FFmpeg is even a feasible option for embedded work because I am yet to compile.
The biggest red flag for me thus far is that FFmpeg uses dynamic memory allocation. I am unfamiliar with how to assess the amount of dynamic memory that it uses. This is very important information to me, and if anyone is familiar with the amount of memory used or how to assess it before compiling, I would greatly appreciate the input.
After further research, it seems to me that encoding video is often a hardware intensive task that can use multiple processors and mega-gigbyte sizes of RAM. In order to avoid this I am performing a minimal amount of compression by utilizing the AVI format.
I have found that FFmpeg can't readily be utilized for raw-metal embedded systems because the initial "make" of the library sets up configuration settings specific to the computer compiling, which conflicts with the need to cross compile. I can see that there are cross compilation flags available, but I have not found any documentation describing how to use them. Either way I want to avoid big heaps and multi-threading, so I moved on.
I decided to look for more basic source code elsewhere. mikekohn.net/file_formats/libkohn_avi.php Is a great resource for very basic encoding without any complicated library dependencies or multi-threading. I am yet to implement, so no guarantees, but best of luck. This is actually one of the only understandable encoding source codes that I have found for image to video applications, other than https://www.jonolick.com/home/mpeg-video-writer. However, Jon Olick's source code uses lossy encoding and a minimum framerate (inherent to MPEG), both of which I am trying to avoid.
Related
I'm looking for a simple-ish library for outputting audio. I'd like it to meet these criteria:
Licensed under LPGL/zlib/MIT or something similar – i'm going to use it in an indie commercial application and i don't have the money for a license.
Written in C, but C++ is fine.
Cross-platform (Windows, Linux, maybe OSX)
Able to read from some sort of audio file (i'd prefer WAV or OGG but i will gladly use less popular formats if need be) in memory (i've seen the use of a memfile struct and user-defined I/O callbacks). I need the file to be in memory because i put all my resources into a .zip archive, and i use another library to load those archived files into memory.
Supports playing multiple sounds at the same time, having a max of 8 or so is ok.
I'd really like to either have the source code or a static library (MinGW/GCC lib???.a), but if nothing else is available i will use a shared library.
I must have come accross two dozen different audio libraries in my search, all of which haven't quite met these criteria...
I would recommend PortAudio + libsndfile. Very popular combo, meets your requirements. Used by many other software applications including audacity.
Some of the candidates that immediately spring to my mind are:
SDL (there is a tutorial that demonstrates how to play a .wav format sound)
libav
ffmpeg
libao
OpenAL Soft
Jack Audio
You may have already looked at these and eliminated them, though. Can you give some more detail about the libraries that you have eliminated from consideration and why? This will help narrow down our recommendations.
You might want to look into SDL and SDL_mixer. Here is a good tutorial.
I've used SDL_mixer and it makes it easy to play background sounds or music and play multiple simultaneous sounds without having a need to write your own sound sample mixer.
I ended up using PortAudio (very low-level, flexible license) and wrote a mixer myself. See this topic i made on the C++ forums for some other people's tips on writing a custom mixer. It's not hard at all, really; i'm surprised that there are so many mixer libraries out there. For a breakdown of the WAV format (ready-to-stream raw audio data with a 44-byte header) see this.
I'm looking for advice on how to generate videos in C. The main issues I'll be dealing with are
Must be open source, would prefer BSD type license but GPL is acceptable
Must be reasonably well documented (I'm looking at you FFMPEG)
Must be able to generate a non-compressed video
Must be able to draw each frame
Should be able to set the frame rate (though of course I can just make n identical frames)
My toolkit is the GNU development system on UNIX like systems (Linux, OS X, Cygwin, ...)
Having said that, I'm picky about these requirements because if I don't have them I know I can pretty easily generate the individual frames with libgd and use ffmpeg commands to output a video. The point is that I'd rather be able to draw them and generate the video entirely in my C code. Even better would be to be able to provide the library in my own source (BSD license) so that my users don't need to worry about getting things installed on their particular platform.
I'm not set on a video codec other than the availability of non-compressed video (I'm visualizing changes in simulated rotational spectroscopy as rotational parameters or other variables like temperature change). Advice on a particular codec welcome.
a previous relevant question from me is here Reverse Engineering old paint programs
I have set up my base of operations here: http://animatorpro.org
wiki coming soon.
Okay, so now I have a 300,000 line legacy MSDOS codebase. It's sort of a "be careful what you wish for" situation. I am not an experienced C programmer. I'm not entirely inexperienced either, but for all intents and purposes I'm a noob to the language and in particular the intricacies of its libraries. I am especially ignorant of the vagaries of the differences between C programs written specifically for MSDOS and programs that are cross platform. However I have been studying this code base for over a year now, and this is what I know about Animator Pro:
Compilers and tools used:
Watcom C compiler
tcmake (make program from Turbo C)
386asm, a specialised assembler for the Phar Lap dos extender
and of course, the Phar Lap dos extender itself.
a selection of obscure dos utilities
Much of the compilation seems to be driven by batch files. Though I have obtained copies of all these tools, I have not yet succeeded at compiling it. (though I have compiled its older brother, autodesk animator original.
It's got a plugin system that replicates DLL before DLL's were available, based on REX. The plugin system handles:
Video Drivers (with a plethora of included VESA drivers)
Input drivers (including wacom tablets, and keyboards)
Drawing Tools
Inks (Like photoshop's filters, or blending modes)
Scripting Addons (essentially compiled scripts)
File formats
It's got its own script interpreter named POCO, based on the C language- The scripting language has enough power to do virtually all the things the plugin system can do- Just slower.
Given this information, this is my development plan. Please criticise this. The source code is available in the link above, so you can easily, if you are so inclined, assess the situation yourself.
Compile with its original tools.
Switch to using DJGPP, and make the necessary changes to get it to compile with that, plus the original assembler.
Include the Allegro.cc "Game" library, and switch over as much functionality to that library as possible- Perhaps by simply writing new video and input drivers that use the Allegro API. I'm thinking allegro rather than SDL because: there is a DOS version of Allegro, and fascinatingly, one of its core functions is the ability to play Animator Pro's native format FLIC.
Hopefully after 3, I will have eliminated most or all of the Assembler in the project. I say hopefully, because it's in an obscure dialect that doesn't assemble in any modern free assembler without significant modification. I have tried them all. Whatever is left gets converted to assemble in NASM, or to C code if I can define the assembler's actual function.
Switch the dos extender from Phar Lap to HX Dos http://www.japheth.de/HX.html, Which promises to replicate as much of the WIN32 api as possible. Then make all the necessary code changes for that to work.
Switch to the win32 version of Allegro.cc, assuming that the win32 version can run on top of HXDos. Make any further necessary changes
Modify the plugin system to use some kind of standard cross platform plugin library. What this would be, I have no idea. Maybe you can offer some suggestions? I talked to the developer who originally wrote the plugin system, and he said some of the things it does aren't possible on modern OS's because of segmentation restrictions. I'm not sure what this means, but I'm guessing it means all the plugins will need to be rewritten almost from scratch.
Magically, I got all the above done, and we can try and make it run in windows, osx, and linux, whilst dealing with other cross platform niggles like long file names, and things I haven't thought of.
Anyone got a problem with any of this? Is allegro a good choice? if not, why? what would you do about this plugin system? What would you do different? Is this whole thing foolish, and should I just rewrite it from scratch, using the original as inpiration? (it would apparently take the original developer "About a month" to do that)
One thing I haven't covered above is the text/font system. Not sure what to do about that, but Animator Pro has its own custom font format, but also is able to use Postscript Type 1 fonts, and some other formats.
My biggest concern with your plan, in a nutshell: Your approach seems to be to attempt to keep the whole enormous thing working at all times, tweaking the environment ever-further away from DOS. During each tweak to the environment, that means you will have approximately a billion subtle assumptions that might have broken at once, none of which you necessarily understand yet. Untangling them all at once will be incredibly painful.
If I were doing the port, my approach would be to disable as much code as possible to get SOMETHING running in a modern environment, and bring the parts back online, one piece at a time. Write a simple test harness program that loads a display driver and draws some stuff, and compile it for DOS to make sure you understand the interface. Then write some C code that implements the same interface, but with Allegro (or SDL or SFML), and make that program work under Windows or Linux. When the output differs, you have a simple test case to work from.
Your entire job on this port is swapping out implementations of various interfaces and functions with completely new ones. This is a job that unit testing excels at. Don't write any new code without a test of some kind that runs on the old code under DOS! Make your potential problems as small and simple as you possibly can. Port assembly code instead of rewriting it only if you're reasonably confident that it will actually make your job easier (ie, algorithmic stuff that compiles fine with few tweaks under NASM). Don't bite off a bigger piece than you can comfortably fit in your brain at once.
I, for one, look forward to seeing your progress! I think what you're attempting to do is great. Thanks for doing it.
Hmmm - I might approach it by writing an OpenGL video "driver" for it. and todays machines are fast enough with tons of ram that you could do all the pixel specific algorithms on main CPU into a back buffer and it would work. As the "generic" VGA driver just mapped the video buffer to a pointer this would be a place to start. There was a zoom mode in the UI so you can look at the pixels on a high res display.
It is often very difficult to take an existing non-trivial code base that wasn't written with portability in mind - you mention a few - and then try to make it portable. There will be a lot of problems on the way. It is probably a better idea to start from scratch and rewrite the code using the existing code as reference only. If you start from scratch you can leverage existing portable UI solution in your new project like Qt.
OpenCV
GIL
Is there some experienced user can share it?
I need to know the difference to decide which to choose.
A vote for OpenCV, if running Intel processor, it can use the Intel IPP optimized libraries.
The difference between those libs is huge.
The OpenCV library have a lot of image processing functions for solving various tasks that are common in computer vision.
The GIL library haven't such algorithms at all. It provides easy and strongly typed interfaces to work with different image formats (BGR, CMYK, etc) and that's all. Of course, you can write your own image processing algorithms that works with GIL types. But if want to work with feature descriptors, keypoints, image segmentation and so on - the GIL is not a good choice. IMHO.
Is there a standard way of reading a kind of configuration like INI files for Linux using C?
I am working on a Linux based handheld and writing code in C.
Otherwise, I shall like to know about any alternatives.
Final update:
I have explored and even used LibConfig. But the footprint is high and my usage is too simple. So, to reduce the footprint, I have rolled out my own implementation. The implementation is not too generic, in fact quite coupled as of now. The configuration file is parsed once at the time of starting the application and set to some global variables.
Try libconfig:
a simple library for processing structured configuration files, like this one: test.cfg. This file format is more compact and more readable than XML. And unlike XML, it is type-aware, so it is not necessary to do string parsing in application code.
Libconfig is very compact — a fraction of the size of the expat XML parser library. This makes it well-suited for memory-constrained systems like handheld devices.
The library includes bindings for both the C and C++ languages. It works on POSIX-compliant UNIX and UNIX-like systems (GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD), Android, and Windows (2000, XP and later)...
No, there isn't one standard way. I'm sorry, but that is probably the most precise answer :)
You could look at this list of Linux configuration file libraries, though. That might be helpful.
Here are four options:
Iniparser
libini
sdl-cfg
RWini
If you can use the (excellent, in any C-based application) glib, it has a key-value file parser that is suitable for .ini-style files. Of course, you'd also get access to the various (very nice) data structures in glib, "for free".
There is an updated fork of iniparser at ccan, the original author has not been able to give it much attention over the years. Disclaimer - I maintain it.
Additionally, iniparser contains a dictionary that is very useful on its own.
If you need a fast and small code just for reading config files I suggest the inih
It loads the config file content just once, parse the content and calls a callback function for each key/value pair.
Really small. It can be used on embedded systems too.
I hate to suggest something entirely different in suggesting XML, but libexpat is pretty minimal, but does XML.
I came to this conclusion as I had the same question as you did, but then I realized the project already had libexpat linked-in--and I should probably just use that.