Video

Spent a few days this week ... gasp ... coding C++ on microsoft windows. Ugh. I don't really get paid enough for that pain, but I suppose it's bearable in very limited amounts (and being a professional, one just has to deal with it). I was looking at using directshow to get some images from a camera. No surprise - what a horrible shit, overcomplicated and poorly documented API. The bits I needed to use were removed from the microsoft windows 7 sdk too, and the published work around is to copy the headers from an older one ... sigh. Strangely enough the fastest way to look up functions on MSDN is to type it into the URL bar in firefox and let google find it; the bing link was slow slow.

Although it did force me to finally work out JNI. Which is fairly simple and straightforward and a bit easier than I thought it was. It is a little clumsy but not unreasonably so and in ways that seem to make sense. I think what normally makes it such a horrendous pain is 1. microsoft windows, and 2. ant.

It's a bit of a cold dreary wet weekend and I was still feeling a bit seedy from a (very) boozy Thursday night - not to mention having 2 packets of chips for dinner yesterday - so I just spent all day today hacking. I was thinking of doing some video image processing stuff but that seemed too much like work work so I played with DVB instead. Maybe I should've poked ImageZ a bit more.

Mucked about with a simple bit of code to record the transport stream and change channels, and using ffmpeg's libraries to play them. Very simple and pretty easy. Pity that's really the only easy bit - which is why i've always avoided playing with this stuff before. There's somewhat more to doing anything useful with it than just storing and playing video. Then I got sidetracked learning about the EPG they use in Australia - which is some horrid MHEG stuff, or EIT neither of which I could find much about. Along the way I tried a newer mythtv ... oh dear, that's got even more bloated. It has bits or extensions not only in everyone's favourite extension language of the month that I love to hate - python - but also perl and even more alarmingly, php.

Might need to get away from the screens and keyboards tomorrow.