[9fans] Multimedia on Plan 9

[Anant Narayanan <anant@kix.in>]

Hi All,

While madplay does a good job of playing MP3s, I haven't been able to
get mpeg_play working yet. (It just displays a blank screen and does
nothing, killing it gives no messages either)

There are large number of other A/V formats out there, which are
conventionally played, in form on another, via the ffmpeg library on
Linux/BSD machines. Looking at the 9fans archives it seems like there
was some effort to port it, but I can't find any code.

Also, the SDL/madplay/mpeg_play ports are all based on APE (for obvious
reasons), but APE always seems like a sub-optimal solution as far as
Plan 9 is concerned. How difficult would it be to develop a native Plan
9 library for A/V decoding? Note that most A/V libraries out there make
extensive use of inline assembly, how would that fit in with "The Plan 9
way"?

Hints would be helpful.

Cheers,
--
Anant