Video Player Discovery

[PeteHaughie]

From my recent exploration of video players on the RPi platform I've discovered some things that should be documented.

Lots of Pi video synths rely on OMX Player and if they're also written in openFrameworks like Strange Loop and Andrei Jay's whole ecosystem also ofxOMXPlayer and ofxOMXVideoGrabber. Support for OMX Player was deprecated by the developer in favour of VLC in 2020. It was dropped from the Pi platform OS after Buster and the Pi4 and Pi5 don't have the on-board h264 that OMXPLayer utilised to get the performance boost. So none of the Pi3 edition ISOs will run on the Pi4/5 due to OS unsupported hardware and none of the applications will build on Pi3b+/4/5 on Bookworm due to missing libs - even by adding the deprecated repositories due to the broadcom drivers being incompatible with the video player. OMX Player is also not 64bit.

So the question I guess I'm tacking on to the end of this is this: If we want to preserve the applications should we also want to port the OMX Player to the GStreamer-based ofVideoPlayer and ofVideoGrabber or VLC (which only has a recent and very alpha addon and might not be cross platform)? My initial instinct is to port to ofVideoPLayer/ofVideoGrabber and create statically linked binaries. That won't be necessary for the Pi3 target as the default app is supported but we'd need to update it for the 64bit platform anyway.

[PeteHaughie]

This does lead to some other considerations such as supported file formats and use cases. I personally really like the limited options of the Pi editions and would just like higher res versions on faster Pis. That obviously is a different use case to the SD nature of the VSERPI family.

[rootnotez]

To clarify are you proposing adopting OMX Player and rebasing it on top of ofVideoPlayer, or ripping OMX player out of the VSERPI instruments and substituting ofVideoPlayer.

Collecting links for easy reference:
https://openframeworks.cc/documentation/video/ofVideoPlayer/
https://openframeworks.cc/documentation/video/ofVideoGrabber/

[PeteHaughie]

The latter, replace it in as many places as possible. It shouldn't really be hard to do and it will make the apps more robust and portable.

[rootnotez]

This still only works on RPI3, but not sure why it is seperate than OMXPlayer, just collecting links
https://github.com/jvcleave/ofxOMXPlayer

[rootnotez]

Would MPV be an alternative to VLC?
https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv-examples/tree/master/libmpv