sdl2 video player

Overview

A lightweight video player built on the SDL2 and ffmpeg libraries. It can play multiple videos simultaneously, all synced to a master clock.
In addition, the video playback can be controlled via TCP commands, e.g. "open movie.mp4", "play", "pause", "seekto 350.0", etc.
This allows for an easy interface to other applications - Python, Javascript, etc. -- anything that handles basic network sockets.

Requirements to Compile

Originally built with msys2 and the mingw64 gcc compiler on a Windows 10 machine.

msys2 packages:

• mingw-w64-x86_64-ffmpeg 3.3-1
• mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2 2.0.5-1

Here are my compiler options in CodeLite

• preprocessor : main=SDL_main
• libraries : mingw32;SDL2main;SDL2;avutil;swresample;avcodec;avformat;swscale;ws2_32

Cross-platform note

Everything is crossplatform except the socket programming code, read_from_client() method. The current source code has a winsock2 implementation, for Windows. It would be pretty easy to swap this out with linux socket programming.

Basic Usage

vidserv.exe portnum movie1.mp4 movie2.mp4 ...

If you don't specify a port number, it defaults with 50001, which should be open on most machines.

ffmpeg supports a wide range of codecs and formats, so most videos should load fine.

Hotkey	Command
Down	Seek 10 seconds forward
Up	Seek 10 seconds backward
Right	Show next frame
Left	Seek 0.25 seconds backward
Space	Toggle play/pause

TCP Control

Videos can be opened and controlled via tcp commands.

For example in Python, after setting up tcp connection to vidserv.exe,

pythonCopy
sock.send("seekto 60.0".encode())

• open movie1.mp4 xscreen yscreen width height windowname

  • e.g. open c:/users/fosterseth/desktop/movie.mp4 100 100 640 480 movie1
  • To use native width and height of video, just put 0 for both width and height

• seekto x

  • x is in seconds

• seek+

  • seeks 60 seconds forward

• seek-

  • seeks 60 seconds back

• seek+small

  • seeks to next frame

• seek-small

  • seeks back 0.25 seconds

• play

• pause

• toggleplay

• gettime

  • a request for the current playback time, in seconds
  • client must call recv() to get the message back

• getnumvideos

  • a request for the number of active videos
  • client must call recv() to get message back

• getpos movie1.mp4

  • a request for the current x,y,w,h of movie1.mp4
  • client must call recv() to get message back

• raisewindows

  • restores minimized windows

• closewindows

  • closes all windows, but keeps server running

• break

  • closes all windows and quits the server

Binaries

For convenience, the bin/ folder contains a compiled vidserv and the required DLL to run on a Windows machine.

Credits

dranger's tutorial was immensely helpful for this project. Check out his tutorial if you are new to AV processing.