Re: [Pysdl-devel] Record?

[Mark B. <mb...@0x...>]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Bill Eldridge wrote:
> Did I miss something, or is SDL/pySDL play-only
> for audio?

Just to follow up a bit on what David Clark mentioned...

SDL seems to take the stance of "read only" media handling. The exception is
the function for outputting bitmaps to a file. Needless to say, that's not all
that useful.
It also lacks a means for taking input from alternative sources, as David Clark
mentioned.

I am not opposed to PySDL providing recording abilities for audio, images, or
any other form of data. The functionality would need to exist in the SDL
companion libraries such as SDL_mixer (or the audio subsystem of SDL) and
SDL_image.
Alternatively, PySDL could offer interoperability with Python modules that
allow for saving audio and image data. Modules like PIL and PST could have
optional adaptor functions/classes.

PySDL itself will not implement audio input functionality, but it may in the
end provide access to this functionality through a library. This is simply
because such basic functionality should be implemented in a means that it can
be used by everyone, and not require PySDL so they can record wavs or mp3s in a
C SDL program.


Part of the problem of SDL's companion libraries, is that they offer very
little compared to existing frameworks. The problem with existing frameworks,
is they're often too dependent on themselves. Libraries like Imlib provide much
more functionality than say SDL_image, but it's also very dependent on X,
making it useless elsewhere.  gdk-pixbuf suffers from a similar fate in regards
to GDK, but at least GDK is easily retargetable, so in theory one could write a
GDK/SDL backend (and actually run GTK/SDL on any platform SDL runs on...), and
have something semi-usable.
Or you can go about reimplementing the same functionality in yet another
framework, bringing SDL_mixer and SDL_image up to date with good software
packages..

Even after all of these decades, everyone is still not adopting the principles
of reuse, often times in the name of performance for a given task. It almost
boggles the mind.