[Magiclantern-devel] Great work with the player! Does this list work?

[<pi...@de...>]

Hi everybody!

I just wanted acknowledge the great the work you guys are doing. You started 
quite a large project doing all the non codecs parts from sketch. There's plenty
of work ahead with many challenges and fun. As a first time media player 
developer I've been there :)

Few thoughts that come to my mind:

If possible be as general from the begining as possible. Example don't limit the format
information about a media just as a combined one video and one audio format structure. 
Be prepaired for multiple streams.

Use some sort of virtual function tables for objects with common interface but 
different functionality (like io, format splitter or codecs). Using a switch statments in 
every function is much more difficult the manage and is slower.

Make your own optimized YUV color space displaying code. On today devices 
without hardware overlay support just displaying the YUV frames is about 50%
of the cpu time of the hole video decoding. It's very important that this part
of the code is very optimized. I would suggest to combine your own color space 
converter rigth into the displaying code (using XviD with just YUV output)

I'am not an expert PalmOS developer, but I read on many forums that
switch between m68k and ARM mode is slow (flushing CPU instruction cache).
I would say go with an ARM only player, but this makes debugging much harder.
Still in longterm I see no other options. It would help a lot to create a desktop 
test version of the player (for me it was easy with WinCE and desktop Win32, 
but I think it would help in this case too at least with the codecs and general 
player functions)

Btw does this list work? :)
I subscribed to it early, but didn't receive any mails yet...

bye, Picard
BetaPlayer developer