Interface/Instruction for commercial developers

[DDogg]

I wanted to throw out a thought for the Avisynth team to consider. It is frustrating that many commercial programs such as Video Vegas (incredible program) do not read AVS files directly and also do not have the ability to frameserve back out to my encoders of choice. I think I understand this is two quite different beasts.

I am wondering if it might be feasible to provide some type of interface "kit" to commercial developers so that they could easily provide native support for reading avisynth AVS files.

It strikes me that effort in this area would provide an enormous benefit to the understanding and adoption of avisynth worldwide.

[Nic]

The link2 program (www.videotools.net) can wrap avs files pretty well into psuedo-avi files, which is the answer in most cases (although the fullversion of link2 is not free :( )

As for commercial support, any application that uses the old inbuilt AVI loading functions provided by windows can be used with AVS files. The easiest thing for commercial developers would be to allow their users to load their AVIs in a sort of "legacy mode" that would use the old AVI API functions rather than the application's own built in AVI handlers.

The Windows AVIFile API is so straight forward and well known, that any windows developer wanting to support AVS files would be best off using that. But, maybe a SDK of sorts might encourage proper AVS integration into commercial video apps.

Good to see you around DDogg :)

-Nic

[DDogg]

But, maybe a SDK of sorts might encourage proper AVS integration into commercial video apps.

Nic, thanks for the reply. Yeah, you hit it on the head, I am thinking that some type of "SDK" might lead the blind to water and make them drink without too much effort. Perhaps "holding their hand" might be appropriate :)

On the subject of frameserving - how difficult is that from a programming standpoint? As you might remember when I was active in these forums, I am not a programmer but sometimes I can be helpful in facilitating. My goal is to be able to contact some of these companies and present to them thread or programming examples that might get them kicked into gear.

[sh0dan]

If they open AVS files just as they open an AVI (using the VFW interface, and not trying to parse them manually), they should be perfectly able to open AVS files.

The main problem is, that most programs contains code like:

if (file.extension == ".AVI") {
open_using_vfw(file);
} else {
open_using_other_methods();
}

So they only try to open files having the .AVI-extension, by calling VFW. An example is at MoreAboutAviSynth (http://www.avisynth.org/index.php?page=MoreAboutAviSynth)

A more important thing is that most programs are rather limited in the formats they accept for input - many programs read AVI's as RGB, even though it would be significantly faster to read as YUY2 or YV12.

ps. there is no need to PM me - I read the forum at a regular basis.

[DDogg]

sh0dan,

Thanks for the reply and pardon the PM.

OK, now I can see that opening an AVS is no big deal. Could you or others give me a short explanation of what is needed for a program to frameserve out? Could a commercial programmer get an idea of how to provide frameserving to another application by inspecting the VDub code? Would you have any suggested links or programming examples they might reference? Or, am I completely confused as to my question? It would not be the first time.

[sh0dan]

I don't know - someone could have a look at the premiere frameserver or even the Flask frameserver.