Macintosh Video Library


Short Description

The software in what I am currently calling the Macintosh Video Library (MVL for short), is built upon other people's work, both in structure and in concept. The core image blitting, color-lookup-table loading, and frame synchronization methods make use of Denis Pelli's widely used VideoToolbox routines. Lots of the initialization code is heisted from examples and or samples of Denis' code, or examples from Pete Bex' C code that used Denis' routines. The conceptual structure for how images are stored and displayed was shamelessly borrowed, modified and extended from David Brainard's MatLab interface to Denis' VideoToolbox routines. David's package is called The Psychophysics Tool Box .  Capabilities include
One might ask, "Eric, why the heck did you bother doing all this work when Denis Pelli and David Brainard have already gone to so much trouble to provide useful software?" Well, the answer isn't one dimensional. First, I don't have MatLab, and lots of other people don't either. Second, I'm kind of tired of not knowing how a package works internally; try getting algorithm information out of the MatLab documentation or support people. Third, I had already designed and built my Image Manipulation Library (or IML for short) and I really didn't want to kludge up reading and writing of my image file format for use with MatLab, which has its own image format. Fourth, I have been writing C++ for many years now, and for purposes of code re-usability C++ is much better than C (IMHO, and in the opinion of many Software Experts(tm)).
 
I have made this library available because it seems like it might be useful to others with similar concerns/desires, who have the Metrowerks compiler, and/or don't want to use MatLab. You should be able to compile the MVL software with other compilers than the one from Metrowerks (Denis accomodates several). I just don't know how much effort that would be.

General Overview

Useful Definitions

Detailed Documentation