what language/libraries an app that has a video preview window?

Question

I want to make a simple assistant for putting together AviSynth scripts. This would be a windows desktop application that would have a "preview" screen of an avi movie, which would give you a timeline, play, fast-forward, rewind, advance and go back frame-by-frame. The program would need to know the frame number of the current frame in the player and its filename.

What language is best suited for this? I know PHP ( I understand that this is not a contender ) and am familiar with Java. My thought is that the biggest hurdle with this project will be finding a library for the video playing features. With a cursory glance, no Java video libraries jumped out at me. My next thought would be c++ for this.

The output of this program would be an AviSynth script, a plaintext file which looks like this:

AviSource("myAvi.avi")
Crop(0, 0, 320, 240)
Blur(0.1)

Answer 1

If you have Avisynth installed, the only thing you need for preview (If I understood, that's your need) is something that can decode uncompressed video. It would open like a normal file. I'm sure there are video players implemented fairly well in Java, but I don't know how much functionallity from them you need. Anyway parsing scripts is not easy - I recommend you not to try to if you don't need to.

EDIT: I'm sorry, I thought you needed a very specific app, but from what you seem to need, you don't need to code anything, use AVSP!

Please watch this video, it shows how straightforward it is. It has advanced functions such as auto-completion, (even from your own auto-loading scripts!) syntax coloring, macros, automtic importing, drag&drop (of a video, for instance - just drag it to the video and AVSP makes the loading) scrit preview with zoom and all stuff, you can use automatic or custom sliders (you can make a slider that re-writes a number on the script in real time, for instance for hue/luminosity/contrast/etc. that would be cumbersome to control via script), checkboxes & radio buttons (for boolean values, etc...), text fields that alter strings in real time, and basically anything you need... Please check it out.

Also, VirtualDubMod is OLD.

And yep, AVSP is free, both gratis and libre! =)

Answer 2

There are a few tool kits that can do tihs:

1. C#: DirectShow (DirectX)
2. Java: JMF