These tutorials focus mainly on OpenGL, Win32 programming and the ODE physics engine. OpenGL has moved on to great heights and I don't cover the newest features but cover all of the basic concepts you will need with working example programs.
Working with the Win32 API is a great way to get to the heart of Windows and is just as relevant today as ever before. Whereas ODE has been marginalized as hardware accelerated physics becomes more common.
Games and graphics utilities can be made quickly and easily using game engines like Unity so this and Linux development in general will be the focus of my next tutorials.
Mpeg Video
By Alan Baylis 04/09/2002
Download the Demo with Source Code
The typical approach to adding in-game media such as movies and television has been to cycle through a series of textures. In order to play even a short show meant that a lot of texture swapping and memory had to be used, so the idea was to replace this method with a MPEG decoder and display each pixel as a polygon. I believe this is the first example of this method for two main reasons, firstly it takes a lot of processing to read the frames and display the large number of polygons but this is no longer a problem with the latest video cards, and secondly, it is no picnic writing a MPEG decoder. Fortunately I didn't have to write the MPEG decoder, I have used and modified the freely available source code ported to Win32 by Thanassis Tsiodras which was originally released by the University of California in 1992, back when there was a greater open source ethic.
The demo could use a lot of optimization and could be improved by averaging the color of each vertex between adjacent polygons but does well enough for a first example. A height-mapped version will be good to see too.
To learn how to use the source code read my comments in main.cpp.
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