[MPlayer-users] Self-executing

[The Wanderer]

Evgeniy Stepanov wrote:

> On Friday 23 May 2008 06:47:49 JonY wrote:
>> William Houser wrote:
>>> I need some programming help. I want to make a self-executable
>>> movie in a single file.

>>> What I want to do is compile an exe by myself ( I am NOT a
>>> programmer..not a good one anyway)...if is it possible to, in a
>>> programming IDE, embed (embed not call) an already compiled
>>> executable (such as MPlayer.exe) AND an AVI file, pass the
>>> parameters to the MPlayer internally and run the movie from
>>> inside itself similar to a Flash Projecter .exe? I realize, of
>>> course, that I could just do this with a single folder and batch
>>> file, but thats not the point. I want a sinlge EXE.

>> Hi, MPlayer can't do this. You are asking for the near impossible
>> (as far as MPlayer is concerned).
> 
> Why not? Just append the movie to mplayer binary and run it on itself
> with an appropriate -sb option.

Because you also need to include the "glue" code to do the running,
which would also need to be prepended to the rest, and which would need
to contain both the offset for the beginning of the MPlayer binary
(which binary would, potentially, need to be extracted into a separate
file in order to be able to be run...) and the offset for the beginning
of the movie, both of which will be dependent on the total size of the
glue code itself - and unless you're writing in ASM, producing a final
binary of a predictable size (even given a consistent environment and
compiler and so forth) is not necessarily trivial.

Might not be impossible, but it looks complicated enough that I for one
wouldn't want to promise to be able to do it, much less if tempfiles
were not an option.

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.