Kostya's Boring Codec World

As you might have noticed, NihAV development is not going very fast (or at all — thanks to certain people and companies (where I’d never worked and have no desire to work at) that made me lost a desire to program anything) but at least I think somewhat on NihAV design.

So, here’s how the base should look:

NALibrary
   -> <named collection of NihAV components>
     -> NAClass instance that does some task

So, first you create NALibrary that is used to hold everything else. The main content of this library is a set of named collections corresponding to the tasks (e.g. “io” for I/O handlers, “demux” for demuxers, “compr” for compressors etc. etc.). Each collection holds objects based on NAClass that do some specific task — implement file or network I/O, demux AVI or Bink, compress into deflate format etc. All of this is supposed to be hidden from the final user though — it’s NihAV libraries that do all the interaction with NALibrary, they know their collection name and what type of components is stored there. So when you ask for ASF demuxer, the function na_demuxer_find() will access "demux" collection in the provided NALibrary and then it will try to find a demuxer with name "asf" there. NAClass provides common interface for object manipulation — name querying, options setting, etc.

And a word about demuxers — the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that they should output both packets and streams. This is not just for user inconvenience, it also helps chaining demuxers (nothing prevents people from putting raw DV into ASF and then muxing that into MOV with ASF packets containing DV packets — nothing except common sense but it’s too rare to rely upon).

Morale: if you want to implement multimedia framework start with hash table implementation.

P.S. As for implementation language I’ll still stick to C. Newer programming languages like Rust or Swift or that one with retarded gopher have the problem of being not well-widespread, i.e. what if I’m using somewhat outdated Ubuntu or Debian — especially on ARM — where I don’t want to mess with compiler (cross)compilation? Plus it’s likely I’ll make mistakes that will be hard for me to debug and constructions to work around (I doubt modern languages like passing void* on public interface that’s cast to something else inside the function implementation). Of course it’s a matter of experience but I’d rather train on something smaller scale first for a new language.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2015 at 6:12 am and is filed under NihAV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.