Incorporating video in platform-independent video games using open-source software

In a video game, it is common to embed a prerecorded video and play it at various times during the game for the purposes of narrative, tutorials, hints, or any other goal that the developer sees fit in the game. It is a challenging task to play the embedded video in a cross-platform video game at multiple locations of the screen simultaneously and on an arbitrary surface. This paper describes the use of open-source resources to accomplish such a task. The open-source FFmpeg library is employed to decode video saved in commonly-used video formats such as MPEG-4, AVI or MOV. The platform-independent Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library is used to render video and audio and to handle threading features. The producer-consumer paradigm is employed to separate the tasks of data decoding from data rendering which are run in different threads.