[MPlayer-users] webcam codecs

[jklaas]

Oh, I've got plenty of hardware to play with.  This was just a question to
determine if this would be another way to get proprietary hardware to work
with open source.

As far as buying proper pieces of hardware to work with, it is often
impossible to determine the type of hardware you are getting.  Even with
the so-called "higher-end" webcams.  Often you're lucky that the hardware
specs from past hardware from the same manufacturer and the same model
number matches over the course of manufacture.  So, I would have to say
that your comment about buying "proper" hardware is counterproductive.

Is there documentation on how to incorporate windows codecs in?  It is
not apparent to me where I would look in the code to get this to happen.
If you would be willing to point me towards the area of the code to
look, I'll see what I can come up with.

I apologize if you feel like this is a waste of your time.  Thank you for
any direction you can give.

-- 
			James Klaas

Procrastinate NOW!!!! -- Don't put it off.

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, D Richard Felker III wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:11:06PM -0500, jklaas wrote:
> > I did a search in the mailing list archives for this and I was unable to
> > find any information on this particular topic.  I apologize if this has
> > been discussed before.
> >
> > I'm curious to know a couple things.
> > First, how difficult is it to incorporate new Windows codecs into mplayer?
> >
> > In looking at many windows webcams, it seems to me that the majority
> > of webcams have a USB driver that talks to the webcam and transfers
> > some sort of encrypted/compresed frame to a codec provided with the
> > driver.  Since it doesn't seem to be too difficult to reverse engineer
> > the USB part of the driver to determine how to retrieve bulk transfers
> > from the camera, how difficult would it be to incorporate the codec
> > provided into mplayer to make the stream viewable in mplayer?
> >
> > Or is this so totally unfeasable as to not even try?
>
> The question is whether the cam provides the codec as an independent
> component, or if it's embedded in the crapware that does all the other
> camera stuff. If you want watch movies from the cam using WMP, it
> should be easy to get MPlayer to load the codec. If not, it's probably
> not worth trying. Next time just buy yourself a proper piece of
> hardware that's not intentionally obfuscated...
>
> Rich
>
> _______________________________________________
> MPlayer-users mailing list
> MPlayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
> http://mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users
>