[MPlayer-users] MPEG parsing

[Michael Baer]

I'm starting a research project which involves data compression, so I want to
be able to parse MPEG streams (e.g., MPEG-2 files) in order to manipulate the
DCT components, motion vectors, and other data.  Ideally, it would be good to
have C functions to examine these, write them out into individual files, and,
optionally, put them back together again after manipulation.  (I actually don't
care so much about the last step for what I'm doing; it has to be possible, but
not necessarily easy.)  Anyway, since tools already exist for such actions, it
doesn't make sense for me to purchase a copy of the MPEG-2 standard and
reimplement it from scratch.  On the other hand, mplayer has a huge codebase
and I don't know how well the source code itself is documented; I'd certainly
rather not have to understand lots of arcane parts I'll never use before using
the (different but possibly still arcane) parts I will.  In past projects, I've
been changing an existing MPEG codec that's been set up for me, but these
projects worked with proprietary source code, so I can't use that source code
here.  Do you have any ideas how to start and whether or not to use mplayer -
and whether there's another open source tool I could or should use instead?

(My apologies if such abilities are listed in the documentation, but, after a
fair bit of time pouring over this documentation, I couldn't find any such
abilities described.  Also, let me know whether another mailing list would be
more appropriate; I didn't want to mail MPlayer-dev-eng, since, although I
might get an answer, it didn't seem to be an appropriate forum.)


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