Richard Jones' Log: Say hello to pyglet

Thu, 08 Nov 2007

pyglet is now out in public beta! W00t and congratulations Alex!

Some of you may recall me demoing (and talking about) pyglet at pycon earlier this year. Alex has put in a lot of work since then on the multimedia side of things, and generally cleaning up compatibility issues. Oh, and he's also used it in two pyweek challenges :)

pyglet provides an object-oriented programming interface for developing games and other visually-rich applications for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Some of the features of pyglet are:

  • No external dependencies or installation requirements. For most application and game requirements, pyglet needs nothing else besides Python, simplifying distribution and installation.
  • Take advantage of multiple windows and multi-monitor desktops. pyglet allows you to use as many windows as you need, and is fully aware of multi-monitor setups for use with fullscreen games.
  • Load images, sound, music and video in almost any format. pyglet can optionally use AVbin to play back audio formats such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis and WMA, and video formats such as DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, WMV and Xvid.

pyglet is provided under the BSD open-source license, allowing you to use it for both commerical and other open-source projects with very little restriction.

Let's just say that first point again: for Python 2.5 users, there's no external dependencies or installation requirements when you use pyglet in your application. Oh, and Alex has made AVBin trivial to use when you need wide-ranging multimedia file format support. How cool is that?

Comment by Phil on Thu, 08 Nov 2007

Why don't you use GStreamer (which has ffmpeg support)?

Comment by Richard on Thu, 08 Nov 2007

Why don't you use GStreamer (which has ffmpeg support)?

See the Media on Linux wiki research page, though it's slightly out of date.

Comment by Phil on Fri, 09 Nov 2007

The reasons mentionned on that page are not really valid. Ok the GStreamer framework is not trivial to understand at first glance, but it's really powerful. There's a huge (and friendly) community out there if you want any help (see #gstreamer IRC channel size).

Anyway, my 2cents ;) If you're happy with that-yet-another-lib, that's fine I guess :)

Comment by Richard on Sat, 10 Nov 2007

I am not responsible for the gstreamer work - I only recall the endless cursing at its various problems :)