Friday, January 29, 2010

OwlWatcher update

Since the beginning of the year, I've been poking away at the new video support that uses Xuggler, a java wrapper for FFmpeg. When I get this worked out, OwlWatcher will not only potentially work under Linux, but be open source compliant as well (LGPL).

At the moment, playing at normal speed and stop works, and stepping forward is sort of working, but I haven't taken a crack at seeking arbitrary frames. The biggest issue so far has been getting audio and video streams to play together. Admittedly audio isn't the highest priority, but it would be nice to get it right so OwlWatcher could support multi-modal behaviors, at least in principle.

The rest of OwlWatcher will be similar to the 0.040 release candidate I posted last May. I'll worry about forward compatibility from 0.035 closer to the release, along with coming up with a reasonable installation process, though I'm sure it won't be as simple as the previous release, at least for a few iterations.