Sound In Theory

http://www.vrhotwires.com/InexpensivePanoramicVideo6.html

It's a fact of programming life that you "borrow" a lot of code from other people. Rarely, if ever, do you get to give something back.

For one of our recent projects, we needed to convert video files into a format that can be streamed over the web, YouTube-style. Fortunately, there are plenty of projects on the web that do exactly this, and whose source code is readily available. One such is called FFmpeg. This program allows us to convert video files from any format, into both FLV (Flash Video file, for streaming over the web) and MPG (for downloading).

FFmpeg is excellent, but there is one catch - it's written in the C++ language, and here at Sitdap we use C#. Again, fortunately, some kindly people have written "wrappers" that allow FFmpeg to be used from C#. The best of these is called ffmpeg-sharp. The problem was that ffmpeg-sharp only dealt with audio files. We needed video.

So, I took what existed already of ffmpeg-sharp, and added the video stuff. Traditionally, I would stop there. However, Sitdap being the [advert alert] ultra-cool [/advert alert] company that it is, I wanted to go further. I talked to the guy who originally wrote ffmpeg-sharp, and we agreed that I would add my new video features back into the main version, so that everybody else can benefit. This is, of course, nothing other than the underlying principle of open-source software, but in my experience it rarely happens in commercial companies.

The end result is that (a) thanks to open-source software, we were given a 50% headstart for some software we needed and (b) we've given back the other 50%, which we needed to write anyway, so others can use it. Cool eh?

(I'd like to tender my apologies for this entry dragging the hitherto common-interest Sitdap Blog into techie territory)

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