Porting Virtualdub to Linux

[ChristianHJW]

( I probably will get striked for mass posting, but i guess this has to be discussed here )


Although i was never using Linux myself ( and i wont be using it for the next months, for sure, due to lack of time ) its something i always wanted to know :

- Is it possible ( in principal ) to port Vdub to Linux ?

- if so, what was necessary ? Vdub relies on the M$ platform SDK heavily, especially with respect to VfW/AVI ?

- Is it necessary/sensible at all ? What can Vdub do that mencoder/transcode could not do ?

Belgabor was considering looking into this he said ( if his C/C++ knowledge is up-to-date that is :D ), but i remember Suiryc saying this was a MAJOR task, if can be done at all ?

[TactX]

You should have a look at AVIdemux. It is afaik designed to be a VDub clone. It is quite powerful atm and still growing.

Also the developer (mean) is member here. Nice, isn't it ?

Here is the link (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) !

[omol]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
( I probably will get striked for mass posting, but i guess this has to be discussed here )


Although i was never using Linux myself ( and i wont be using it for the next months, for sure, due to lack of time ) its something i always wanted to know :

- Is it possible ( in principal ) to port Vdub to Linux ?

- if so, what was necessary ? Vdub relies on the M$ platform SDK heavily, especially with respect to VfW/AVI ?

- Is it necessary/sensible at all ? What can Vdub do that mencoder/transcode could not do ?

Belgabor was considering looking into this he said ( if his C/C++ knowledge is up-to-date that is :D ), but i remember Suiryc saying this was a MAJOR task, if can be done at all ?

Even only converting those assembly to gas or nasm would be a major task, so I reckon that porting those wonderful AVISynth plugins (yes, it means Decomb...;) and/or VirtualDub plugins to transcode is more feasible. Or, wait for Wine to mature enough....:)

regards,
omol

[Belgabor]

I discussed this with Cyrius (suiryc) somehow. I think what would need to be done is a complete rewrite of the gui and afterwards fiddle in the internals of vdub. Also we thought not doing a linux version but doing a platform independent version (at least one that can compile on windoze and lunix ;))
I agree though that that will be a major hassle and we'd need experienced linux guys for it.

Cheers
Belgabor

[yokem55]

I'm thinking that porting vDub to linux isn't really going to help linux in getting more sophisticated and mature encoding tools. What vDub (at least for me) does best is serve as an excellent VFW frontend, and without VFW, or somthing to replace it on linux, the only thing that vDub has left going for it are its filtering tools, and even those aren't so desirable since they requre color format conversions.....

What linux REALLY needs to get mature, sophisicated encoding tools, is a complete backend API like VFW, Dshow, or Quicktime to manage and configure codecs, file muxers/demuxes, and filtering tools. I'm hoping that this is the direction the gStreamer project is going, but I have my doubts as they seem more interested in making gStreamer just yet another media player.

[BlackSun]

isn't Vdub running smoothly with Transgaming ?

[Bonzo]

->BlackSun:
VirtualDub is free and Transgaming emulation software is not, isn't?
Wine is free, but VirtualDub 1.4.10 doesn't work on it, I've tried :(

->yokem55:
I don't really need any kind of API, I just want VirtalDub under Linux to encode and edit some video files, as I do in Windows. There are also others programs that I would like to work under Linux: Cinema Craft Encoder, Avisynth, DVDDecrypter, DVD2AVI, and some others. I think that is very difficult without a miracle (Wine is good, but can't do miracles... yet)

Bonzo.

[Joe999]

Originally posted by Bonzo
->BlackSun:
VirtualDub is free and Transgaming emulation software is not, isn't?
Wine is free, but VirtualDub 1.4.10 doesn't work on it, I've tried :(


I don't know if it'd be feasable for you to go back this far, but I'm using a wine build of 20020904 and it's working fine with virtualdub. Every now and again I've tried upgrading wine, but whatever was broken after that release seems to have remained so.

[Infophreak]

I'd wager that a Linux version of VDub depends on two things:

1) That someone writes it (well d'oh! it's Open Source, and software doesn't magically write itself).
2) UCI needs to make significant progress. And there has to be a UCI-compliant player.

Furthermore, I think that MCF would be an important factor in making a Linux version of VDub. For the simple reason that it would provide UCI with one simple file format that it would have to implement. (and of course mpeg-1, 2 and 4)

Now... to use GTK or QT? That's a big question ^_^!

[spyder]

Vdub is lited in the Wine DB as working with it. I'll try it out soon :)

[X-Ray]

I think porting Avisynth2 would be easier and more important than porting VirtualDub. Avifile provides the necesarry functionality to deal with AVIs and Avisynth would be a great addition to AviDeMux and Transcode, because GNU/Linux (and of course *BSD) is currently missing good video filtering software.
Porting Avisynth to the avifile library should be a doable (I did not say easy) task, while porting VDub seems almost impossible to me (GUI and backend/API need to be ported).
As soon MCF stabilizes work on a cross-platform version of VirtualDub(2?) should begin, to provide a standardized interface to the basic MCF-library functions.

dev0

[mean]

Good idea. Furthermore, *nix people tends to like scripting :)

[mean]

I may add that porting avisynth filters are easy to do, they are not that much glued to windows/vfw.

The only tricky part is the ASM code, but by using multi platform asm, i.e. nasm (like Xvid does) could remove that difficulty.

[X-Ray]

Okay, so all that would have to be done is to recode the ASM parts (haven't lokked into avisynth source yet; how much is it?) into non-os specific ASM and replace the VFW-API stuff with libavifile functions.
Anybody really interested in doing this? I might not a big help, since my coding skills are pretty weak, but I'd definetly help whereever I can...
dev0

[omol]

Originally posted by Infophreak
Now... to use GTK or QT? That's a big question ^_^!

real man uses Xt.....:D

regards,
omol

[ChristianHJW]

I talked to Erik Walthinsen, founder of gstreamer, about porting Vdub to Linux based on gstreamer http://www.gstreamer.net lately, and it seems feasible ...

[spyder]

Up late Mr. Wiesner??

Anyway, I'll check out VirtualDub in Wine tomorrow night :)

[blixi]

- Is it necessary/sensible at all ? What can Vdub do that mencoder/transcode could not do ?

Hmm the only thing I could imagine, is the easy of use for cutting purposes. But avidemux is on the way.

So I would say it isn't worth to try it, helping avidemux, transcode, mplayer/mencoder, mjpegtools, gstreamer would be more usefull. Mencoder is really reliable and fast, transcode is really flexible.
-> ease of use => can be catched trough scripting, frontends (kmencoder,dvd::rip) and as mentioned gstreamer could catch that too.

Would be awfull:


mencoder ---- "avidemuxer" ---vid---- ogmmux
|_________audio_____|


Just by drawing some graph's ...
;) :D

Greets

blixi

[vvx]

Originally posted by omol
(yes, it means Decomb...;)



Decomb was ported to transcode .. around August looking from the mailing list archives -- at any rate, you can use it in current transcode releases. If you have the transcode source around look in /filters/ivtc

Testing it out for myself at the moment, we'll see if the port is as good as the original.

[omol]

Originally posted by vvx
Decomb was ported to transcode .. around August looking from the mailing list archives -- at any rate, you can use it in current transcode releases. If you have the transcode source around look in /filters/ivtc

Testing it out for myself at the moment, we'll see if the port is as good as the original.

Will definately take a look. Thanks.

regards,
omol