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I've always wanted to try and make a media player but I don't understand how. I found FFmpeg and GStreamer but I seem to be favoring FFmpeg despite its worse documentation even though I haven't written anything at all. That being said, I feel I would understand how things worked more if I knew what they were doing. I have no idea how video/audio streams work and the several media types so that doesn't help. At the end of the day, I'm just 'emulating' some of the code samples.

Where do I start to learn how to encode/decode/playback video/audio streams without having to read hundreds of pages of several 'standards'. Perhaps to a certain extent also be enough knowledge to playback media without relying on another API. Googling 'basic video audio decoding encoding' doesn't seem to help. :(

This seem to be a black art that nobody is out to tell anyone about.

lightburst
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The first part is extracting streams from the container. From there, you need to decode the streams into media. I recommend finding a small Theora video and seeing how the pieces relate there.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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you want that we write one answer and you read that and be master in multimedia domain..!!!!

Anyway that can not be by one answer. First of all understand this terminolgy by googling

1> container -- muxer/demuxer

2> codec --coder/decoder

If you like ffmpeg then go with its basic video plater application. iT is well documented at here http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/ it will shows the method of demuxing container and decoding any elementry stream with ffmpeg api. more about this at http://ffmpeg.org/ffplay.html

i like gstreamer more then ffmpeg. it has well documentation. it will be good choise if you start with gstreamer

Jeegar Patel
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  • Well of course not. I did say 'where do I start to learn'. All tutorials of ffmpeg are obsolete and ffplay isn't exactly the simplest example. I mean it's over 3 thousand lines. – lightburst May 02 '12 at 07:26