What _is_ JEDI-SDL, and what is it good for?

[GuyWithDogs]

Until I hit this forum, I'd not heard of JEDI-SDL. It sounds interesting - at least, as much of it as I could figure out.

Can someone give me a pointer to a good overview, or to a tutorial, or a succinct description of what JEDI-SDL is, and what it's good for?

If I wanted to do a "jukebox" application that could play a list of MPEGs, AVI, MOV (Quicktime), JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. one after the other - can it do that? Or facilitate it? And do it under Windows and Linux? Or am I reading too much in to it?

Thanks.

[Murmandamus]

JEDI is "Joint Endeavor of Delphi Innovators", which is an long-time group of Delphi (and Pascal) developers who work together to create a nice, free library of routines and components for Delphi. The project has wavered in popularity at times, but still persists today in maintaining and extending that library.

More info on JEDI here: http://www.delphi-jedi.org/

SDL is "Simple DirectMedia Layer", and it is a simplified, standardized cross-platform API for interacting with various multimedia devices, such as sound, video, 2D rendering, input devices, etc. It works with OpenGL to provide fast 3D rendering.

More info on SDL here: http://www.libsdl.org/

JEDI-SDL is simply a wrapper library to provide access for the SDL API to Delphi, as written by the JEDI group.

To answer your question about your application, I think it could be used to do pretty much what you are asking (not sure about the specifics of video decoding and playback myself). Check out the websites regarding it and see if the specifications meet your needs. The libsdl site also has tutorials and full documentation for the API.

Good luck! :)

[technomage]

Hi and Welcome

SDL www.libsdl.org is a cross platform game development API. It allows you to write (almost) the same code on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX etc.

SDL is mainly a 2D library but it have functions to use Opengl with it. There are alsoa number of other SDL libraries available for images (sdl_image), sound (sdl_sound), networking (sdl_net), Mixing (sdl_mixer), play movies (smpeg), the list goes on.

JEDI-SDL are the units that you will need to use if you want to use SDL from Delphi/FreePascal/Kylix etc. There are numerous units available for all of the libraries above and more (ODE, FMOD,Newton etc) as well as a whole host of examples.

Can you write the app you mentioned??? Well yes (not sure about the quicktime part) SDL_image can handle most popular image formats, smpeg can play mpeg movies, SDL_flic and handle flic animations. :D

Hope this all helps

[technomage]

Murmandamus you beat me to it :D Thats what I get to typing so slowly :wink:

[GuyWithDogs]

So does this library let me develop apps that are truly cross-platform, or is it a good starting point, but I need to do platform-specific tweaks for graphics, file formats, etc.?

It sounds interesting, and maybe it's enough to disuade me from looking at C#. I'm primarily targeting Windows with Delphi 7 right now, but there's a lurking interest in Linux as well. This is for commercial development...

Thanks for the speedy replies!

[Murmandamus]

SDL was designed to be cross-platform, just like OpenGL.

I am sure there will be cross-platform tweaks, as no API is perfectly 100% generic, however, of all available APIs, SDL should minimize them.

Windows and Linux should be the most well-supported of all the platforms.

[GuyWithDogs]

Thanks, all, for the answers. Looks very interesting. Perhaps I'll get a chance this weekend to try something out.

[technomage]

I have written a number of SDL based applications and I rarely go down to platform specific API. The Free Pascal FCL is almost 100% compatable with the Delphi VCL so all of the platform specific areas are taken care of. You might have the odd

{$IFDEF WIN32}Windows{$ENDIF} or {$IFDEF LINUX}Libc{$ENDIF}

Here and there but it's very minimal.

[WILL]

You both beat me to it! :P I was at work and could not respond.

Both great answers so I cannot add much to what has been said so far except that I believe SDL is a save bet on Mac OS X aswell as possibly BeOS, Solaris and a select few others.