A Cinder block for playback of sequences of DDS-compressed textures. Like M-JPEG, but with DDS.
First, you'll need a directory full of DDS-compressed textures. The easiest way to do this is probably to use something like FFMPEG or Handbrake to encode a video into a PNG image sequence, and then use ATI's Compressonator (or another DDS batch-encoder) to turn the PNGs into DDS files. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a good way to do the DDS compression on OSX (see TODO below).
Once encoding is done, look at the sample application. Basically, you just
point mdds::Movie at your folder of DDS textures, and from there on it works
just like any other movie playing class.
Using DDS texture sequences for movie playback uses very little system memory and very little CPU. Furthermore, using this library allows movie playback without QuickTime, which, in turn, allows compiling Cinder apps in 64-bit mode, which can be useful if you're doing work that involves storing lots of data in memory (like, say, large buffers of video frames).
On the other hand, DDS texture sequences have abysmal compression ratios when compared to real video formats, so they'll not only use a lot of disk space, but the disk I/O will become a bottleneck unless you have an SSD drive.
This library is very similar to the excellent and ambitious Hap. Hap, however, is currently limited to playback using QuickTime (see above). Furthermore, the simplicity of this library makes it easy for you to fix it, explore it, and hack it.
- Add support for YCoCg (DXT-6) compressed textures
- Add an application for transcoding movies