[Paraview] git master and latest ffmpeg

[Michael Wild]

On 29. Apr, 2010, at 17:38 , Sven Buijssen wrote:

> Michael,
> 
>> The problem with ffmpeg IMHO is that it is a moving target (as is also declared on their website). It is almost impossible for ParaView to keep up and just arbitrarily picking any revision is no solution either, because that will cause a lot of trouble for packagers.
> 
> It's just that PV and VTK for a month or three now supported both the old
> outdated ffmpeg version from February 2007 or so (downloadable as a tarball from
> the addons section of the VTK software download website) AND the latest ffmpeg.
> Up to last Monday. Given the effort spent to re-add support for newer ffmpeg
> versions and considering that the change in ffmpeg that breaks it this time in
> PV is less complex to work around than last time (headers completely reworked),
> I think we shouldn't let go that easily.

OK, I have to agree there. But unless ffmpeg changes their development model, keeping up with them will always be a PITA... That's one of the reasons why I created the VTKOggTheoraWriter (and, of course, the licensing/patents issues).

> 
>> <shameless_plug>I suggest you give the included Ogg/Theora writer a try.</shameless_plug>.
> 
> I'm well aware of your contribution and compile ParaView with
>  -DVTK_USE_OGGTHEORA_ENCODER:BOOL=ON -DVTK_USE_FFMPEG_ENCODER:BOOL=ON
> ever since you announced your git fork of PV on this mailing list, so even
> before ogv support has been added to the official source tree. :-)  It's just
> that some of my users prefer avi over ogv.
> 
> Sven

Cool. BTW, does anybody here know how to reliably encode a movie for embedding in PowerPoint slides? I once found a way to transcode with ffmpeg, but that didn't work the last time I tried (although all the .avi files I created with the supposedly correct codec choice played fine in MediaPlayer...) The only thing that worked was to open the thing in MovieMaker and export it as a PowerPoint movie from there. It's beyond me why PowerPoint can't just embed and play about any format+codec that MediaPlayer accepts when it is using the MediaPlayer components in the first place!


Michael