Video List

So one thing i've been mucking about with using jjmpeg for is creating a GUI for listing videos ... which seems a pretty basic starting point for doing anything further.

Yeah it's not much to look at so far but one has to start somewhere. I might look at using Piccolo2d as the rendering surface, although I have to determine how to handle virtual items as I do here with the JList. Apart from general fugliness it flashes white whenever you change the view sort, which is quite unpleasant. As can be seen, I hooked it up to mplayer after you double-click a row, just for a laff ...

Under the bonnet it uses jjmpeg of course to scan the files - it's currently generating 128x128 preview images at 1 minute intervals - of which only the first is shown. I have a separate tool to `import' the videos for the moment but I have code lying about to allow dropping of files, so it wont be hard to add. I'm using Berkeley DB - java edition to hold the meta-data and preview images, and i've hooked it up so the DB is scanned in another thread. I use different secondary indices for each sorted view so they are all just as fast (slow?) as each other - this will also let me query by keyword with a little more code. I'm also using SoftReferences to implement a cache of database items. Unfortunately Berkeley DB JE doesn't let you query by record number like the C version, nor read the secondary database keys without also dereferencing to the primary database (i.e. slower than might otherwise be), but judicious use of threads can help alleviate such issues.

In short: it should scale quite well.

Probably ...