I’m in favor of an SDL library project that wraps ffmpeg, myself. It
keeps with the crossplatform-ed-ness of SDL, and offends the M$-hater
in me not at all, as opposed to making in a DirectShow library… of
course, I ca’t say anything about libraries, actually, so if you want
a DirectShow wrapper library that supports SDL, I say go for it! 
However, back to an ffmpeg wrapper, I’ve not designed any libraries
myself, nor done TOO much with video coding, and so wouldn’t know the
first thing about starting a wrapper library; that is, I have no clue
how to organize it.
However, I would be MORE than willing to work on such a project,
submitting code I’ve already worked out which loads video and audio,
and converts it to a usable format for SDL. (That is, USING SDL and
ffmpeg, I can play video with audio, and it’s not too shabby.) So if
anyone else interested knows the slightest thing about arranging/
planning a library, please let me know!
And feel free to email me off-list, and I’ll give you my IM info and
we can communicate there, as well.
– Scott
PS: I’m at in Tokyo, which is almost exactly twelve hours ahead of
US Eastern time, so I apologize in advance if that’s rather
inconvenient…On Oct 15, 2007, at 6:05 AM, Edward Byard wrote:
Arjan
Thanks for the info.
I agree - a video API should not be included in SDL as standard,
but as an additional library. Even as
a wrapper to DirectX / DirectShow (or whatever M$ call it now)
would be very useful.
Ed
----- Original Message ----
From: Arjan
To: sdl at lists.libsdl.org
Sent: Sunday, 14 October, 2007 9:28:52 PM
Subject: [SDL] video playback API in SDL
Message: 10
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:26:08 +0000 (GMT)
From: Edward Byard <e_byard at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Re: [SDL] SDL 1.3 roadmap…
To: “A list for developers using the SDL library. (includes
SDL-announce)”
Message-ID: <289818.99775.qm at web25405.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“iso-8859-1”
Will (or could) SDL 1.3 include any form of video playback API? I
think it’s so important these days…
Ed
Video playback is not a good idea to incorporate into a generic API
like
SDL. Because video standards are constantly evolving and new
(de)compression methods are thought up every other week or so, it
would
be impossible to keep SDL up to date. At least, that’s my humble
opinion 
For video playback there is already a really good project you can use,
namely FFmpeg. (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/) There is only a tad
bit of
documentation, but there are increasingly more people using it, so
there
is an increasing number of people you can bother with questions.
If that is a bit rich for you, you could try SDL_ffmpeg. It is a
little
wrapper I wrote, aimed on being an easy to use multimedia library.
It is
in a very early stage but it is in fact usable. I committed it to
the
sdl libraries section. So if you need simple video playback, check it
out. I really need some people who start using it, since I need the
feedback to improve on it.
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