We have built a windows based software system that allows users to import their own video for viewing in the software. It works fine for AVI and WMV as we use a windows based player. For encoding or playing to work with most common video formats we have to ask our customers to download a 3rd party codec pack, such as K-Lite or Combined Community Codec Pack. Many of our customers are not allowed to do this due to IT Management rules.
Are they are any suggestions regarding a player and encoder that can be built into our windows based software without needing 3rd party codec packs.
I am not sure if ffmpeg, handbrake, VLC can be used for this purpose.
Thanks. J
I would suggest MP4 with H264 + AAC/MP3
This works in any browser without any third party codecs AFAIK.
Give this a try HTML5 Video
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So, assuming we got a distribution without proprietary codecs installed.
Let's take Linux Mint for example. I want to store and playback wav and ogg format sounds, either by using my own software, or by using another developer's software. So far so good right?
Imagine now that we have the following scenario. For some reason, I wanna playback a file that is either an mp4 or mp3 or mpeg or any other format, made by proprietary codecs. Instantly, I will need a codec for these formats.
I read somewhere that Fluendo sells solutions for "legal codec usage" for linux distros.
URL of fluendo: http://www.fluendo.com/en/
So here comes the questions:
Using VLC and ffmpeg is enough for me to convert a file to an ogg or ogv so I can playback a song or a video using an open format. You can also playback playback files made by proprietary formats. But are VLC and ffmpeg legal to use, to playback such files made by proprietary codecs? For example, ss VLC codecs okay to be used without paying anyone for mp4 playback? Is it okay to convert a file from mp4 to ogv?
If not, are there any legal and open source and free (as in freedom) codecs around that can solve the issue, or does someone have to pay a product, to be ethically correct, to the developers of the proprietaty codecs?
Note that I do not ask for Windows, since codec licenses are included to the price of the operating system. I ask exclusively for a free linux distribution.
Since #LordNeckbeard pointed me to the FAQ of FFmpeg, that I really can't believe I missed, it became clear to me that there is a problem in using proprietary codecs, thus there are some file formats that could be avoided to keep ourselves safe. Otherwise if someone can afford a license to use them too, that would be perfectly fine.
So mp3, mp4, mpeg and some more patented formats are to be avoided, if not licensed.
ffmpeg can be built so it can exclude support for such formats and if you need to use sound or video to your software ogg and ogv are nice and efficient formats as we all know.
Digging a little deeper Ι found that too.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/playogg_radiostation.pdf
I came across a H.264 video which i would like to play in my c++ application. Could anyone suggest what could be the easiest way of doing it? Or What library can be used for the purpose.
Thanks in advance..
Windows API are DirectShow and Media Foundation (mind availability across Windows verions). You need a codec installed in Windows to be able to play the file, stock codec is only provided with Windows 7 editions. A choice of third party codecs is available.
Another option is to use a different framework such as ffmpeg which includes support for container formats and decoders.
I am trying to play an H264 video with graphedit on Windows 7 32bit.
Graphedit is unable to render the file.
I tried to mount the graph manually using the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder (also know as Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Encoder) but I could not connected the filters.
Here is the pipeline I tried :
File Source >> Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder >> Video Renderer (or VMR9)
I also tried this :
File Source >> MPEG-2 Demultiplexer >> Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder >> Video Renderer (or VMR9)
In either case, I could not connect anything to the file source filter.
The H264 video I am trying to play is the Serenity trailer I downloaded from here : http://www.h264info.com/clips.html
Do you have any idea how I could play the h264 video file with graph edit?
Thank you
For starters. That file is an mp4, so you need an mpeg4 demuxer filter, which Microsoft does not provide for DirectShow. MediaFoundation supports it natively, but that functionality is not exposed to DirectShow. There are commercial DirectShow filters available or the open-source "ffdshow" plus "Haali Media Splitter" will do it. If your project can use the open source products, that will also provide a decoder with wide-ranging compatibility.
Assuming you don't want to use ffdshow and instead get a demuxer from elsewhere, it may or may not work with the Microsoft DTV-DVD Video Decoder. I've seen erratic results with it. A lot of content it just doesn't want to play.
One other thing is that you will likely want to use the Enhanced Video Renderer in Win7 instead of VMR9. VMR9 is neutered in Win7 (compared to XP). It's no longer compatible with dxva hardware acceleration, and the scaling is limited to the ugliest mode.
Use the File source but connect it to Geraint Davies' free mpeg4 demux available at http://www.gdcl.co.uk/mpeg4/
If you then render the output pins of the demux, the video decoder will automatically be inserted. I just tried it with the video you mentioned and it works fine.
I saw, in an application from a major software vendor a dll called "DivXDecoder.dll" - which intrigued me as (a) it implies the existence of an easy to use divx library, and (b) I'd rather like to play divx compressed movies in a product I work on.
The DivX project itself seems to concentrate on making Codecs and tools for end users. Are there any C/C++ friendly projects that make playback of divx content in Win32 or Cocoa apps possible?
Look at mplayer sources - it uses the ffmpeg library that handles decoding from a number of formats.
DivX is a compressor that conforms to MPEG-4 Part 2. XviD and some versions of Windows Media are also implementations of the standard. So anything that can decompress MPEG-4 Part 2 should be able to handle things compressed with DivX.
As for actual decompression libraries, I'd recommend libavcodec. It's widely-used (= good support), cross-platform, and open-source (LGPL, so can be used in commercial apps). It's also fairly easy to use from it's C binding. It can open and play many different codecs (and with libavformat, handle many different wrappers i.e. avi, mkv, etc.).
If it's Windows-only, using the OS-provided Video For Windows might be a better option if you just want to play MPEG since you wouldn't need to ship it with your app and you avoid potential license issues. Be warned, though, that this requires the user to have certain codecs installed. On Win7 (and Vista I think) the MPEG codecs required to play DivX/XviD are installed by default, however they're not on XP...
Don't waste your time trying to implement DivX playback in a Cocoa application. Use QTKit. If someone wants to playback DivX content in your app they will install a DivX QuickTime plug-in.
Environment: Windows XP/Vista, VS2008, C#/.NET 2.0, VideoGrabber.
Hi All,
I'm writing an app which captures cameras input and encodes them into a movie file (including sound).
My client suggests I encode the movie using the DivX codec. But it's not installed by default and it's not redistributable: Users would have to download, install and configure it themselves.
Is there a Codec available in default Windows (XP+) installations that I could use to encode video and sound? It must support compression. Ideally, I should be able to programmatically set basic configuration.
Note: I read this question but it doesn't actually address my needs.
TIA,
Is there a Codec available in default Windows (XP+) installations that I could use to encode video and sound?
About the best you can hope for is WMV2 (WMV v8). You may be able to encode it using qasf.dll.
The codecs you get for AVI in XP are all woeful efforts from the early days of ‘Multimedia PCs’: things like Cinepak and RLE, which are of zero use for modern full colour/resolution video, and Intel 4:2:0, which is only chroma subsampling, not really actual video compression.
If you need better than that you'll have to start embedding your own codecs, eg. from ffmpeg.
But it's not installed by default and it's not redistributable: Users would have to download, install and configure it themselves.
That's best anyway. Silently installing codecs onto a system is rather antisocial as there are often clashes between them and you could end up messing up other DirectShow applications. For example there are (at least) three different common DirectShow codecs that can handle “DivX” (which is really nothing more than MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video plus MP3 audio in an AVI container): DivX, Xvid and ffdshow. Having more than one installed can be a recipe for bugs.
Not sure how useful this is to you, but I was trying to answer that very question just recently. This article suggests DIB, I420, or IYUV are supported on all platforms... at least in OpenCV. I had the least trouble with I420.