Request for new fields (V4RB)

[Andy Fuchs]

at 07.08.2004 15:22 Uhr, Scott Steinman wrote:

> 1. Databases could contain movies. Rather than having the programmer
> need to convert a movie to a String to store it in a VBLOB (and convert
> it back upon retrieval), I'd like to have a specialized VMovie field
> type (as you have with VPicture) to V4RB that would handle the
> conversion for the programmer? To make it cross-platform, the internal
> representation could be QuickTime since it's available for both Mac and
> Windows.

Hi Scott, hi Ruslan,

sorry to jump in, but I really dislike this idea!

Although Quicktime would be a nice backend to have for a (rather
specialized) VMovieStream class, it would also limit it's usage. Quicktime
is nice to show/view movies, but would also be a big limitation if used as
streaming video source, since there are lots of more popular movie-streaming
formats available.

Let me give an example:

- Imagine we have a Vstream - field
- And we have a movie stream as MPEG-2
- To store it into a db (no matter if this makes sense or not), I'd need a
'StreamToField'-method (simply write an arbitrary file to a field)
- To retrieve it, we'd need a 'FieldToStream'-method
- (No need for Quicktime at all, up to this step)
- To view/show the stream we then need a plugin mechanism to stream the
content of a Vstream-field to a certain output. (No need of QT either,
because QT cannot stream an MPEG-2 anyway, if you don't have the
Quicktime-MPEG2-Extension installed)

So IMHO a Quicktime-dependant Vmovie-class would be a big limitation
(especially if you think about deploying your db on Linux as well)

Now let's think a little further:

We want to show the stream using OpenGL instead of QT:

If we have a (QT-dependant) Vmovie class, there's no way to go from here. If
we have a more generic Stream class we just need a post-processor (Plugin)
to view the movie using our preferred output.

This not only works across multiple platforms, but also across multiple
output formats. The only thing we need would be some meta-data about the
original stream. (and some plugins, of course)

But that's only my humble opinion.

-- 
-- Andy Fuchs
-- silent movie media
-- mailto:andy at foxwerk.de
-- http://www.silent-movie-media.com