has anyone ever thought of writing their own media players?

[yseric]

has anyone ever thought of writing their own media players that can play all kinds of music and video? I'm actually doing research on how the media players are put together. I know that MS has an API called directShow, and I know that there are different codecs out there. Other than that, I dont know much! Can anyone here help me? Thanks

 

[notfred]

I thought about writing an MPEG-1 decoder, but its a lot of freaking work.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Kinda

|
|
|
v

 

[DaveSimmons]

You might look at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ and the Foobar2000 project there. There are dozens of existing media players, many with source code, but building your own will be a good learning experience.

I might be doing one for FLAC playback over wifi once I get a pocket PC, since my jukebox PC is FLAC not mp3 or wma. Socket programming is also just a fun thing to do

 

[yseric]

Thank you guys for your help. Do you guys know if you develop the player that potentially plays differnent kinds of formats, can you just get decoders for all of those formats for free, then develop the control programming??

 

[DaveSimmons]

It varies:

- some are free and/or open source (FLAC),
- some have source but are probably infringing patents (LAME MP3),
- some are proprietary but with SDKs for using the format, but may only work if the veondor's player is also installed (Microsoft, Realnetworks)
- some require per-copy licensing to use legally (CSS for decoding DVDs)

You can probably decode most everything, it just isn't free or legal ot include libraries for some formats in your own player. Piggybacking off of someone else's player would help for some formats.

 

[Nothinman]

If you want to see how difficult it can be, get the mplayer source and start digging. It doesn't use Microsoft's wrapper codec APIs because it's not natively Win32 software, but it's an excellent player and it does run on Windows under cygwin.

 

[BFG10K]

has anyone ever thought of writing their own media players that can play all kinds of music and video?

Nope. Too much time an effort when I already have the excellent Windows Media Player 9 series for free from Microsoft.

 

[Haden]

There are loads of players which just add GUI to directshow/win codecs API. The problem is - if user got his codecs messed up or doesn't have right one, all these players just fail, if you go this way, why your player will be special...
ZoomPlayer got millions of options : not worth to compete here, others have subtitle support (without special fiters etc.), WMP 6.4/8/9, BSPlayer, A2... take your pick.
What I would suggest is player which can actually fallback to his *own* decoding routines in case system ones doesn't work, one which can just play mpegs w/o index (and probably restore it while playing, so user just has to watch movie for several minutes and he can seek it) etc.
And because it's such a huge work, I think you should go to www.mplayerhq.hu, walk around and offer your help with Windows port (if you want Windows version).
Whatever you decide - good luck.

 

[yseric]

If I develop a commercial player with MS directshow, do I need to pay license fees for MS? Is there any licensing terms??