MiniVideo is a small video decoding library developed from scratch in C, bundled with small testing programs developed in C++.
MiniVideo has been tested with several CPU architectures (x86, SH4, MIPS, ARM).
The build system uses CMake. Both library and test programs can be installed into your system.

MiniVideo has been developed in 2010/2011 during an internship I did in a French company called httv. Its goal was to provide a video thumbnailing program, with a source code easy to read and to understand for learning purpose. After a clean-up pass, the code has been published early 2014 with httv permission under the LGPL v3 license (video framework) and GPLv3 (test softwares).

The minivideo library can:

• Open video files with various container to demux and remux audios/videos content.
• Open H.264 compressed videos and decode them to export intra-coded pictures.
• Extract various metadatas from container and elementary streams.

• H.264 / MPEG-4 part 10 "Advance Video Coding"
  • please note that at still a few bugs inside CABAC decoding process being worked on...

• AVI [.avi]
• WAVE [.wav]
• MPEG-PS (MPEG "Program Stream") [.mpg, .mpeg, .vob, ...]
• MP4 / MOV (ISOM container) [.mp4, .mov, .3gp, ...]
• MP3 "elementary stream" (.mp3)
• H.264 "elementary stream" ("Annex B" format) [.264]
• MPEG-1/2 "elementary stream" [.mpg, .mpeg]

• Elementary Streams
• MPEG-PS (MPEG "Program Stream") [.mpg, .mpeg, .vob, ...]

• jpeg (when libjpeg support is available)
• png (internal OR when libpng support available)
• bmp
• tiff
• tga

$ cd minivideo/build/
$ cmake ..
$ make

Note: You can easily enable multithreaded build with the "make -jX" argument:

$ make -j$(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo)

Note: You can tune CMake by adding extra arguments:

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release/Debug
-DCMAKE_BUILD_Mode=Dynamic/Static
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=../cmake/toolchains/xxx.cmake
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/bin

Note: You can also change several build options directly into the "minivideo/CMakeLists.txt" file.

Installation into the system, available for root user:

$ su

make install # INSTALLATION INTO THE SYSTEM, ROOT USER ONLY

Do not forget "FindLibMiniVideo.cmake" directory in the cmake/modules/, which defines how to find the library (libminivideoframework.so file) and its header (minivideoframework.h file) In case of problem, it may be necessary to manually indicate the paths of these files.

$ cd mini_analyser/
$ qmake
$ make

$ cd mini_extractor/build/
$ cmake ..
$ make

$ cd mini_thumbnailer/build/
$ cmake ..
$ make

Installation into the system, available for root user with both testing softwares:

$ su

make install # INSTALLATION INTO THE SYSTEM, ROOT USER ONLY

$ cd mini_analyser/build/
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../../minivideo/build $ ./mini_analyser

Then drag and drop files to analyse them!

$ cd mini_extractor/build/
$ ./mini_extractor -i 'myfilepath' [-o 'mydirectory'] [-a nb_tracks] [-v nb_tracks]

Command line arguments:

-h : print help
-i : path to the input video
-o : path to the output folder, where extracted streams will be saved
-a : maximum number of audio stream(s) to extract
-v : maximum number of video stream(s) to extract

$ cd mini_thumbnailer/build/
$ ./mini_thumbnailer -i 'myfilepath' [-o 'mydirectory'] [-f picture_format] [-q picture_quality] [-n picture_number] [-m picture_extractionmode]

Command line arguments:

-h : print help
-i : path to the input video
-o : path to the output folder, where generated thumbnails will be saved
-f : export format for the thumbnails (can be 'jpg' 'png' 'bmp' 'tga' 'yuv420' 'yuv444')
-q : thumbnail quality (1 to 100 range)
-n : number of thumbnail to generate (1 to 999 range)
-m : extraction mode for the thumbnails (can be 'unfiltered', 'ordered' or 'distributed')

$ cd minivideo/doc/
$ ./generate_doxygen.sh

Open "minivideo/doc/doxygen.html" with your favorite browser.

$ cd minivideo/doc/
$ ./generate_cppcheck.sh

Open "minivideo/doc/cppcheck.html" with your favorite browser.

// UNSUPPORTED for BP and XP profiles

• (FMO) Flexible Macroblock Ordering
• (ASO) Arbitrary slice ordering
• (RS) Redundant slice

// UNSUPPORTED for XP profile

• Data partitioning
• SI and SP slices

// UNSUPPORTED for HiP profile ("HIGH")

• CABAC decoding process still has a few bugs (WIP)
• No deblocking filter
• Interlaced coding (also PicAFF and MBAFF features)
• 4:0:0 "greyscale" subsampling

// UNSUPPORTED for Hi10P profile ("HIGH + 10bits samples")

• Sample depths > 8 bits

// UNSUPPORTED for Hi422P profile ("HIGH + 10bits samples + 4:2:2 subsampling")

• Sample depths > 8 bits
• 4:2:2 subsampling

// UNSUPPORTED for Hi444P profile ("HIGH + 14bits samples + 4:4:4 subsampling")

• Sample depths > 10 bits
• 4:4:4 subsampling
• Separate color plane coding
• IPCM macroblocks