embedded video/audio player?

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, Lynch, Jonathan wrote:

> Is there a way, or an external, for playing mpeg movies without using QT
> or WMP?

What would you use then to play the media?  Even with a simple text file you
need some means to view it.


> I would think it would be fairly straight forward to be able to
> constantly update an image to include the information for the next frame
> in a series of frames. I am not sure what sort of frame rate you would
> be able to achieve if this were done solely in transcript.

This is extremely unlikely given you'd have to write something to decompress
all the proprietary and non-proprietary codecs used to compress all video
formats out there.


> My reason for asking, is that I think it would be nice for multimedia
> presentations to be able to just pop in the CD, press a button, and it
> all plays. Having to worry about whether QT or WMP is installed seems
> very problematical.

Virtually every multimedia title out there includes system requirements on
its packaging.  Even media sites like iFilm and similar require that you
have Real, WMP or QT to view the content.  Requiring that users have some
multimedia framework installed is actually pretty standard.


> In the past, I have found QT to be somewhat distasteful, because every
> time I played something with it, QT would set itself to be the default
> media player. That is obnoxious. Default settings should be under the
> user's control.
> 
> Besides, not everyone will have either QT or WMP installed.

This is the reason for stating System Requirements. :-)


> I guess, if this were in a situation in which file size was not such an
> issue, then one could convert the movie to a gif animation, and have
> synched-up audio play at the same time - sounds kind of awkward though.

Again, you'd need to write something that could decompress any multitude of
audio and video formats out there -- not a trivial task.


> So - has anyone tried any sort of scheme for playing video/audio without
> depending on other programs being installed on the users computer?

I would expect the most people to answer doing something like this is too
much work.  The labor required to pull this off is significant or perhaps
redundant considering that most of the players have been in development for
for years by teams of programmers.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Development & Design
-----
E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com