[MPlayer-users] Advice needed on development of new video application

[jng_junk at greenmail.demon.co.uk]

Hi there. I'm working on a Linux project, and I need some advice on the
best way of going about the development of it. I would like to do two
separate things, which might seem a bit bizarre at first sight, but please
bare with me!

1) Play an MPEG video in full screen, but overlay (semi-transparent) 
graphics overs the top of it. (Not too strange)

2) Play an MPEG on the faces of a rotating cube, using Open GL! (A little 
wacky I admit - but it will be cool!)

To date I have been using the QT library to do my graphics. It seems
pretty well suited but I am open to change if there is something more
appropriate for the tasks I have mentioned above. QT has Open GL
extensions which will probably come in useful.

I was wondering if mplayer has an output mode that I could use to help me
do the MPEG decoding part of the tasks mentioned above. For example, is it
possible to use mplayer to decode each frame, and then use QT to take this
data and render it on the screen in the desired way.

I suspect the above approach would involve hooking my code into the source
of mplayer and compiling them as one application. I don't have a problem 
with this, but obviously development will be simpler if I can keep them 
separate.

If I'm not careful, I can quite believe I will run out of CPU in trying to
do what I want. So I am probably looking to use all the hardware assist I 
can. This could be complicated by the fact that I want my application to 
output the graphics on the TV-out port of my graphics card, rather than 
the monitor output?

I realise that option (2) is quite adventurous, and if doing it means that
option (1) is made more difficult, I might have to forget about option (2)
for the time being? I suppose what I am saying is that if there is a
simple way to do overlays, hopefully semi-transparent ones, I might have
to begin with that and build up to option (2)?

I would be really grateful if anybody can point me in the right direction,
so that I begin my development on a path that has some chance of
succeeding! If this is not a good forum for discussing these questions,
then I would also be very appreciative if you could redirect me to
somewhere more appropriate.

Many thanks for any help you can offer,

James.