BOSSA 2008: Video Player Internals

Last week I attended BOSSA, a conference on open source software for mobile embedded platforms, organized by INdT. It was held in the town of Porto de Galinhas, Brazil. Since then I have been hanging out in the INdT labs in Recife, hacking on xine, catching up with friends and exploring the old city.

The topic of my presentation at BOSSA was Video Player Internals:

Embedded platforms put demands on latency and memory use. Video playback makes these difficult to guarantee. This presentation discusses the architecture of video players, and the problems imposed on them by the design of video codecs and their containers. To explain these problems we look at both proprietary and open source formats (MPEG, Ogg, Theora, Dirac, etc.) and evaluate open source video players in this context. We particularly examine xine and GStreamer, and introduce the minimal architecture of OggPlay.

• Slides [613KB PDF]
• Article [330KB PDF]

I'm very grateful to INdT for the opportunity to attend, it was an awesome conference in a very beautiful part of the world.