[Python-Dev] SoC proposal: multimedia library

[Pete Shinners]

Lino Mastrodomenico <l.mastrodomenico <at> gmail.com> writes:
> I would like to participate as a student in google Summer of Code and
> I'm interested in feedback on a multimedia library for Python.
> 
> The library I propose should have the following features:
>     * the capability to extract and decompress video and audio from a
> few common multimedia file format;
>     * and, vice versa, it can create a compressed video file from a
> series of still images and from uncompressed audio;
>     * it should have an interface as simple and pythonic as possible;

My main question is what is the image and sound container passed back to Python?
This single thing along would be worth a SoC if it could be implemented across
all libraries.

Will your image objects be transferrable to PIL, Pygame, PyOpengl, Numpy,
Pythonmagick, Pycairo, wxPython, etc? It would be best if this could avoid the
"fromstring/tostring" mojo that always requires and extra copy of the data for
each transfer.

If the core numpy arrays could ever get added to the Python standard library,
this problem would be mostly solved. I believe there was a SoC for Python last
year for this exact array problem.

Your proposal sounds dangerously close to implementing some file demuxing by
yourself. Do not dare touch any of the file bits in your own library. This
proposal should only be for getting data from existing decompression libraries
into some general Python container.