Thats a great idea, but a bit of thought is needed before we plough ahead...

There is a huge range of different audio/visual media file formats. There are also many different media players out there already... You don't want a media player application, you want something more low-level... right?

Media players usually have a series of plug-ins which contain codecs for reading and writing each different format that they support.

Most of these codecs will no doubt be written in C, and some formats may be based on Open standards and/or have Open-Source code for accessing them, eg mpeg . If so, we may be able to submit these to the site (perhaps with some modification).

However, some will be proprietary, eg the Real Media format. I'm not sure how we'd go about getting hold of codecs for these. They may need to be reverse-engineered, which may actually be illegal in some cases. :twisted:

Or perhaps you actually want something slightly higher level, ie. a general module for accessing any of the (major) formats, which simply uses existing codecs that you may already have...?

Either way, this does sound like an interesting project - can you perhaps give a bit more information about what you're looking for and in what context you want to use it?

If you're prepared to contribute some code and/or ideas, to help develop this, we can make this into a public project on the site. Otherwise, you could turn it into a development request, using our Request System. You may find a developer who is prepared to write the code for you, for nothing, for publishing under the terms of the GNU GPL licence, or else you may have to pay them :shock: