[FFmpeg-devel] FOMS 2009 FFmpeg outbrief

[Michael Niedermayer]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 09:52:20PM +0000, Robert Swain wrote:
> 2009/1/26 Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at>:
> > On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 04:22:02PM +0000, Robert Swain wrote:
> > [...]
> >> because its API examples are unclear and
> >> monolithic rather than modular (I have had to implement swscale in a
> >> separate program and it took a lot of prodding and guess work to make
> >> it not crash and function properly as I had to use ffplay.c and
> >> ffmpeg.c as reference points at the time) and so on, and it has no
> >
> > what was wrong with libswscale/swscale-example.c ?
> 
> Note that I was working on it back in July of 2007, so I was looking at:
> http://svn.ffmpeg.org/mplayer/trunk/libswscale/swscale-example.c?revision=23722&view=markup
> *Looks at the file.*
> 
> As a code example, it lacks detailed comments of what each line does.
> In my opinion, code examples should be like tutorials in that they
> explain what the goal of the code is, what each bit does, the
> functions used, maybe which headers they're from, the arguments of the
> functions etc etc. It should be very explicit and informative about
> how all the code works so that a reader can very easily understand the
> meaning of all the significant bits of the API and how they can be
> applied to achieve something useful.
> 
> A coder will come in with a problem they want to solve. They want to
> convert an image buffer from one colour space to another, or they want
> to scale it, or both. They've found out that libswscale does this. How
> do they use the API to do it? What format do their buffers have to be?
> What initialisation needs to be done? What actually conducts the
> scaling/conversion? What needs clearing up afterwards? What
> performance/quality related flags can be passed through the API that
> may be of interest? What other concerns might I have when using the
> API?
> 
> For someone coming from the API user side with no knowledge of FFmpeg
> or MPlayer but just having found libswscale, swscale-example.c did not
> at that time really answer too many of those questions. One has to
> (know to!) dig around in the header files for more API information and
> then play around to figure out what is needed for a simple application
> like those proposed above or what to change from pre-existing code to
> make it work for their application.
> 
> *Looks at the file that currently exists to see if any of his
> complaints have been addressed.*
> Doesn't look like it. This isn't meant to be a dig at anyone for not
> doing it. I'm just pointing out what I perceive to be a good quality,
> easy to use code example and for what we should aim.
> 
> Michael: what do you think of what I've said?

i fully agree
but i am too lazy to write anything ATM, a commit (no patch needed)
to swscale-example / doxy in *.h and README in libswscale is welcome

[...]

-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the
dead. -- Aristotle 
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