[MPlayer-users] webcam codecs

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 01:11:06PM -0500, jklaas wrote:
> I did a search in the mailing list archives for this and I was unable to
> find any information on this particular topic.  I apologize if this has
> been discussed before.
> 
> I'm curious to know a couple things.
> First, how difficult is it to incorporate new Windows codecs into mplayer?
> 
> In looking at many windows webcams, it seems to me that the majority
> of webcams have a USB driver that talks to the webcam and transfers
> some sort of encrypted/compresed frame to a codec provided with the
> driver.  Since it doesn't seem to be too difficult to reverse engineer
> the USB part of the driver to determine how to retrieve bulk transfers
> from the camera, how difficult would it be to incorporate the codec
> provided into mplayer to make the stream viewable in mplayer?
> 
> Or is this so totally unfeasable as to not even try?

The question is whether the cam provides the codec as an independent
component, or if it's embedded in the crapware that does all the other
camera stuff. If you want watch movies from the cam using WMP, it
should be easy to get MPlayer to load the codec. If not, it's probably
not worth trying. Next time just buy yourself a proper piece of
hardware that's not intentionally obfuscated...

Rich