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
-
single image display
-
movie (image sequence) display
-
simultaneous display of multiple movies
-
extensive, easy Color Lookup Table manipulation
-
high level image/movie positioning
-
photometer/voltmeter free display linearization
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.