Revel, the Really Easy Video Encoding Library

Questions? Check the Revel FAQ!

News

• 12/9/2004: Version 1.1.0 has been released! This release adds the ability to encode audio streams as well as video, and adds a few safety-related functions which every Revel application should get in the habit of using. I've also put up some online documentation for the Revel API. Enjoy!
• 10/30/2004: I've added an online FAQ for Revel. If you don't see your question listed there, please ask me! Turn your unasked question into a frequently asked question!
• 10/26/2004: Version 1.0.1 has been released! This release fixes some serious compatibility problems on the Cygwin and DJGPP platforms. Many thanks to Julien Monville for finding and fixing these bugs!
• 10/18/2004: Revel has been selected for participation in the IBM Linux on POWER open source developer challenge. I'm not clear on the details exactly, but it sounds like you can enter, port Revel (or one of the dozens of other projects) to the LinuxPPC platform, and maybe win an Apple G5 computer! Check the contest site for full details.

About

Revel is a library designed to be the shortest, simplest path between your application and high-quality well-compressed video output. Any program that generates a series of successive images (e.g. video games, 3D graphics applications, media players, animation packages) can use Revel to output a compressed AVI video, without having to know hardly anything about the overwhelming esoterica of video encoding. Revel is implemented in C++, but the public API is in plain old C for maximum compatibility.

Key Features:

• The most straightforward video encoding library you're likely to find, anywhere.
• High-quality, high-compression MPEG-4 video encoding based on the XviD codec (translation: Revel makes really pretty, really small videos that most people can watch without downloading special software).
• Free!

System Requirements:

Revel has been tested on Windows XP and Linux.

In order to compile Revel, you must have already compiled and installed the XviD core libraries.

Compiling Revel under Windows is not recommended for the impatient or faint of heart. To be more specific, compiling XviD under Windows is kind of a pain, and Revel requires XviD. A binary distribution of the Revel libraries for Win32 (compiled with MSVC .NET 2003) is also available, which is statically linked against xvidcore 1.0.2, so you can really just plug and play.

Download Revel

Revel is distributed as source code and pre-compiled binaries. Take your pick!

Usage

Online documentation for Revel is available (generated by Doxygen). The reveltest.cpp file (located in Revel's src directory) provides a complete example of Revel in action. For more details about the options available, consult the revel.h header file.

It's worth mentioning that the AVI files created by Revel are encoded with the XviD codec (a variant of DivX, itself a specific implementation of MPEG-4 -- but see, this is exactly the sort of crap that Revel aims to help you avoid). In order to view them, you need to have a video player capable of playing DivX video:

• Windows Media Player 10 apparently supports DivX right out of the box. Make sure your copy is up to date using Windows Update.
• Divx.com has players available for Windows and MacOS.
• I don't know about Unix options. I only use Unix over a command-line these days. However, Google is (as always) your friend.