The Movie Library is a collection of routines within the IRIS Media Libraries™ that provides a C language application programming interface (API) for reading, writing, editing, and playing movies on Silicon Graphics workstations. The API provides a uniform interface to movies of various formats and lets you convert movies from one format to another. This chapter describes the features and applications of the Movie Library.
This section provides a quick overview of the features and applications of the Movie Library. You need not have specialized knowledge about digital media or synchronization methods to use the Movie Library.
The main features of the Movie Library (libmovie) are:
the ability to read, write, and play movie files
a file-format-independent API
file format conversion capabilities
support for Silicon Graphics Movie format, versions 2.0 and 3.0
support for Apple® Computer QuickTime™ movie format
data compression and decompression
asynchronous playback support
flexible playback control
support for movies embedded in applications software
You can easily integrate playback or creation of movies into your existing application without making extensive changes to the application's main event loop, or you can incorporate movies into an application that doesn't already have an event loop, because the Movie Library uses its own event queue.
Application categories include:
3D graphics animation
You can use the Movie Library to save 3D graphics images as a movie that can be used to provide rapid playback of computationally intensive graphics scenes.
scientific visualization
You can use the Movie Library to assemble a series of images from an IRIS Explorer™ application into a movie in order to look for patterns that aren't apparent when looking at the still images one by one.
computer-based training (CBT)
You can use the Movie Library to play embedded movies to illustrate complicated procedures in interactive tutorials.
live video recording
You can use the Movie Library to convert video input from your video option board (IndigoVideo, Sirius Video™, or Galileo Video™) or video from Indy Video™ into a movie.
digital video editing systems
You can build video editing applications on top of the low-level data handling routines provided by the Movie Library.
Other libraries that your application can use in conjunction with the Movie Library include:
Video Library
ImageVision Library
IRIS GL or OpenGL
Audio File Library
The Movie Library uses the capabilities of the following libraries to play movies:
Audio Library
Compression Library
Digital Media Library
IRIS GL or OpenGL
Your application need not include the header file for the Digital Media Library, because it is included in movie.h. Normally, your application need not include the header files for the Audio Library, Compression Library, OpenGL, or IRIS GL unless it uses those libraries directly.