Need to extract frames, use as bitmaps, replace in vid stream?

[pnag]

Hi folks,

Yup, I'm a noob... But please don't hold that against me!

I'm looking to load a video file (extension doesn't really matter as long as it's not too obscure!), extract a frame at a time and alter it as a bitmap, and then replace it, back into the stream or a new stream of the same type.

Help! I've been told that MPlayer/VLC/Virtuadub can do this and that their DLLs can be accessed from within a C program, but I don't even know where to begin.

Any and all help very very graciously accepted!

[nolxev]

This is not related to programming (I guess), anyway, what's the problem? You have to understand how application like VirtualDubs works, hot to cut a movie, save a frame, replace it and so forth. Download it and do some tests.

[pnag]

Sorry, I should have specified!

It is a programming problem as I need to be able to pass the frames as bitmaps to a neural network API that I've spent a long time working with that's written in good old C.

I could do it manually, but it would take forever. The idea here is

1) load video and extract frames
2) apply neural net to values from image/frame
3) create new video stream/tag back in the old frame.

Hope that clears it up a bit!

[philkr]

As far as I understood you are going to make a kind of filter. Since you already mentioned VirtualDub, I suggest you use the VirtualDub Filter SDK. It enables you to create DLLs, which can be loaded as a filter into VirtualDub.
Check it out here: http://www.virtualdub.org/filtersdk