[MPlayer-dev-eng] Plugin for Graphics in Music Playing Mode

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2000 at 11:53:45AM +0200, Arpi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I wanna know if someone is making a plugin (or
> > something) to visualize something cool (other than
> > just chars) when playing music, like those for XMMS or
> > WinAMP.
> > 
> > If yes, let me know who and the actual stage of
> > development.
> 
> afaik no one
> 
> > If no, where could I get info about where (in the
> > internal MPlayer structure) to get the song info
> 
> this is the main problem.
> as soon as compressed audio/video left the demuxer, they
> never meet again. audio goes to audio codec, then audio
> filters and finally audio out. same for video.
> 
> no way to use audio data for generating video data.
> 
> so, to implement it you have to do messy hacks or make
> big architectural changes in the code.
> 
> i like your idea, but i don't even have idea how to
> implement it cleanly in mplayer design.

I would think the best way would be to make a pseudo-video decoder
that could be enabled for audio-only files, and an audio filter that
passes stuff along to this video 'decoder'. That shouldn't require
much in the way of architectural changes, and it has the benefit that
you could put it before or after your other audio filters to visualize
either the proe-filtered audio or the final audio output (or something
in between).

Rich