I suggest a developers feature that is similar to an already (twice) requested feature - the one to automatically take screenshots at a specified interval.
What I'm suggesting is that BSPlayer should provide a way for other apps to request a screenshot of the video currently playing, as (due to hardware overlays) it's really hard to get a screenshot from an outside app (if I'm mistaken, I'd appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction to how to do it).
An example of usage is for instance, the
Amblone (DIY Ambilight) system which lights up the back of your TV/monitor according to what's on the screen. To know what colors to use, it takes screenshots of the screen and calculates the colors accordingly. Ofcourse, this has to be done often, so, performance is crucial. When using hardware overlay, this method does not work ofcourse. If on te other hand, there were some way to get a screenshot from the video, that would be great.
Ofcourse, a solution would be to turn off hardware overlay, but, hardware overlay is here to help so, most people will want to have it turned on.
I've researched quite a bit on how to capture the hardware overlay from another app, but as far as I can tell, it would be a lot of hacking and hard work, if even possible at all. Ofcourse, this feature is the domain of Amblone and other projects that use video screenshots, but, I think that it would be useful for BSPlayer to have this feature, which would allow people to easily do this type of projects and focus on the "cool stuff" and bless us with more cool features for bsplayer :)
3rd November 2011
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