Carl Sziebertis a software engineer with an interest in Spring, Hibernate, Red5 and jQuery development.

If you are a Red5 or FFmpeg user, then you should be very interested in what Xuggle is working on. Their current project, Xuggler, is a welcome addition to my RIA toolbox, and should be a mainstay of yours as well. From their website:

“The Xuggler is a free and open-source library for Java or C++ developers that allows you to decode, manipulate, and encode (almost) any type of video file in near real time. It is for programmers who want to add video processing support to their products.”

What does this mean for me, you ask? Let me provide some history for you on my own experiences. When I started out with streaming media back in 2004, there was only one decent way to build applications. That was using SSAS on Flash Communications Server 1.5. (For those of you into fact checking, Red5 was around back then, but was still very much in it’s infancy.) To accomplish something like the functionality available in Xuggler was next to impossible. Transforming a stream wasn’t exact an “on-the-fly” activity. It meant installing FFmpeg, writing some sort of wrapper around it and then invoking it as a post-process after the stream had finished recording to disk. Even a relatively trivial task like pulling screenshots out of a live stream required a huge amount of overhead and in-depth knowledge of the FFmpeg internals. Xuggler is aimed squarely at making this sort of thing much simpler. Don’t believe me? Give their demo a look:

In addition to open-sourcing the project, Xuggle also provides an added benefit to Red5 developers in the form of a native adapter to create stream mash-ups in near real time. If that isn’t enough to convince you to check out Xuggler, then I’m not sure what is. Details on the project can be found here. The source code can be checked out from Subversion here.