theora - Aug 2003 - questions questions questions

hi,

ok. i am pretty new to this list, but there seems to be little activity 
at all.
first of all, here is a screenshot:
http://greenthumb.jabberstudio.org/video.png  - it's screenshot of my 
buddy list in my jabber client (java based).

I have a simple (or not so simple) task to achieve:
stream the video from one end through the jabber server to another end 
and show the stream in my buddy list. i can grab with some native code 
images from /dev/video0, grabbing from vfw://0 should be no big deal, 
either. I don't need 30fps - 5 fps are more than sufficient.

Q:
1) Can i use theora already to encode my video stream?
2) Can i use theora to decode my video stream and get a single image 
from the api which i can draw somewhere (in java into my buddy list)
3) can i use something as a proxy? i heard rumors of icecast2 ...

All hints, suggestions are welcome!

best regards,
ulrich

<p>
-- 
Ulrich B. Staudinger
http://www.die-horde.de
email: us@die-horde.de
jid: uls@jabber.org

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(Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to this list, too, and by no means a core
developer or anything.)

Am Mit, 2003-08-13 um 12.20 schrieb Ulrich B.
Staudinger:
> ok. i am pretty new to this list, but there seems to be little activity 
> at all.
Yeah, very disappointing indeed. I really hope it will go beta soon,
because we _need_ it for our business. But maybe people are just on
vacation at the moment...
> 1) Can i use theora already to encode my video stream?
> 2) Can i use theora to decode my video stream and get a single image 
> from the api which i can draw somewhere (in java into my buddy list)
> 3) can i use something as a proxy? i heard rumors of icecast2 ...
The following is just a rough explanation, trying to avoid words from
the codec/stream/ogg-speak :-) Please don't beat me for any
inaccuracies.

Theora already works for encoding/decoding streams. Once you get used to
it, the API is quite straightforward to code. Have a look at the splayer
and encoder examples in CVS. Note that theora is a codec and relies on
OGG to package the data (so you have two layers, the OGG packets, which
in turn contain the theora data).

One feature is that an OGG stream can contain multiple codec streams
(encoder/splayer e.g. use a theora stream for the images and a vorbis
stream for the sound). But don't be fooled by the complexity, if you
only want to transfer video, things will be a lot easier.

Theora does not deal with how the data actually is transfered. The
encoding process actually outputs more or less a stream of bytes, which
can be fed into the decoding process. Once the decoder has read enough
bytes so that a image (called "frame" in this context) can be formed,
it
will let you know, so you can draw the image to screen. I have no
experience with proxies, but it should be straightforward to send theora
data through a socket connection (or preferably UDP packets), possibly
using some library which talks to the proxy.

Hope that helps a bit

<p>Markus

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