More Than Technical

Archive for the ‘ffmpeg’ Category

Hi

I’d like to share a quick tip on rotating video files.

I’m always frustrated with taking videos with my phone. Single handedly it’s easiest to do it when the phone is upright and not in landscape mode. But the files are always saved in landscape mode, which makes them rotated when you watch.
Although there are plenty of GUI software to do it, using the command line is faster and can also be batched!

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I recently had to build a demo client that shows short video messages for Ubuntu environment.
After checking out GTK+ I decided to go with the more natively OOP Qt toolbox (GTKmm didn’t look right to me), and I think i made the right choice.

So anyway, I have my video files encoded in some unknown format and I need my program to show them in a some widget. I went around looking for an exiting example, but i couldn’t find anything concrete, except for a good tip here that led me here for an example of using ffmpeg’s libavformat and libavcodec, but no end-to-end example including the Qt code.

The ffmpeg example was simple enough to just copy-paste into my project, but the whole painting over the widget’s canvas was not covered. Turns out painting video is not as simple as overriding paintEvent()…

Firstly, you need a separate thread for grabbing frames from the video file, because you won’t let the GUI event thread do that.
That makes sense, but when the frame-grabbing thread (I called VideoThread) actually grabbed a frame and inserted it somewhere in the memory, I needed to tell the GUI thread to take that buffered pixels and paint them over the widget’s canvas.

This is the moment where I praise Qt’s excellent Signals/Slots mechanism. So I’ll have my VideoThread emit a signal notifying some external entity that a new frame is in the buffer.
Here’s a little code:

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