| How It Works |
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This system relies on the "Video File API Reader" codec, commonly called VFAPI. Rather than being a genuine video compression codec that produces a typical AVI file it acts as a "frame server". As you may have guessed, it's job is to serve up frames. What that means is, while it appears as a regular AVI file to any program trying to load it, what it is actually doing is passing RGB data from a serving application, such as TMPGEnc. When the program asks for frame 500, VFAPI fetches it from the server and passes the data along to the calling application. It may seem like a lot of hassle at first, but the VFAPI reader codec makes any program that supports the VFAPI standard compatible with any program that can load AVI files. As you can see VFAPI can be very powerful. Lucky for us TMPGEnc can load RTV files, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Kirk Morger. Since TMPGEnc also supports VFAPI we can use the VFAPI reader codec to serve RTV frames from TMPGEnc to anything that supports AVI files. Even though TMPGEnc is really meant for encoding MPEG video, we skip this functionality all together and simply use it to help serve RTV data to the application of our choice. This opens up a vast array of possibilities.
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