NeHe OpenGL Lesson35 – Playing AVI Files In OpenGL

This sample shows us how to play AVI files with OpenGL. In addition to get AVI files frame animation images, the author used windows native AVI playing library instead of re-writing his own AVI file parsing and frame image decoding features.

 

 

Main Idea

The main workflow like following:
1) Open a AVI file stream;
2) Create a bitmap object, and set this bitmap object to the current device context;
3) grab a frame animation data, and draw current frame into current device context with DrawDibDraw function;
4) after the step 3), the current frame image already in the Bitmap object. So update the texture object’s content with glTexSubImage2D function in your current bind texture object;

 

The AVI files playing support on windows are:

#include <vfw.h>
...
#pragma comment( lib, "vfw32.lib" )

 

Something More

This sample also tells us some other funny stuffs:
1) Bitmap save color as little Endian, but OpenGL use big Endian. That is why need to flip the bitmap data;
2) A good example about what we should do if we want to add some assembly into our c or c++ source code;
3) When we need to update a texture on fly, we could update texture data only. No need to release the old one and create a new one.

The full source code could be checked from here.