Re: GSoC

On 3/21/07, Antony Dovgal <antony@zend.com> wrote:

On 03/21/2007 10:47 AM, Tijnema ! wrote: On 3/21/07, Richard Lynch <ceo@l-i-e.com> wrote:

I splice the ID3 tags onto the front of an MP3 stream in PHP on this site: http://uncommonground.com/ The id3 library in PHP is quite good at this, but needs a maintainer...

Well, it is a start, now only processing work needs to be done :) To convert from MP3 to Wave for example, I think this will require the LAME lib, and to use with OGG, it will require the OGGvorbis lib. But about WMA, I never saw a Linux lib for it. So that would require creating a new lib for WMA, or directly implementing it into the PHP source. So the MP3 and OGG support shouldn't bee too hard to implement, but other file formats might be harder. And now I'm only talking about Audio, my first idea was to implement Video (Audio+Video). Video is even more advanced, then we should work with DivX and XviD codecs. (Thank god, they are Open Source). But having this support for video, it would be possible to easily create a site like youtube, where they even have a "screenshot" of the movie, which is actually just a frame in the middle of the file. And of course it would be possible to resize the video files. I don't think anybody sane is doing audio encoding and video resizing in PHP. PHP is about interface, clients are not going to wait an hour or two for a page to load.

Like i said, video resizing might be useful for sites like youtube. And what i'm trying to do with audio is more extending the limits of PHP. Ever wanted to become a web DJ?

There is a bunch of mature opensource utilities (transcoder, lame, oggenc etc.) and you can always use them to convert WAV to MP3 and AVI to OGG, it's just a matter of implementation. What about WMA? do you know a library/encoder dat does convert from/to WMA?

That said, I would be glad to see a PECL extension able to read video files and grab screenshots (that seems to be quite common requirement). The ffmpeg extension is GPLed, which is a no-no for PECL.

Well, video files are just a set of frames, so if a PECL extension is able to read video files, they already need to be decoded, and so, all work is done already, it shoudl be very easy to also create other formats then.

Re sound files, we already do have something: http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/pecl/sndfile/ It just wasn't released.

Ah, never checked the CVS for items. I will take a look at this PECL extension, and see what's done already :) Tijnema

-- Wbr, Antony Dovgal