I'm at a point with my game/engine where I need to be able to display pre-rendered movies as cutscenes onto a plane as an animated texture, say something I rendered as an animation in a raytracer thats 10 seconds long or a youtube video that I downloaded. This could be in mp4 or any format that I can convert to. What is the easiest way to do this? Versus the best way? Note that I'm not looking to implement a custom version of VLC into my engine. I'm also not so worried about audio at the moment although that would be great to include as well.

I have been seeing a lot of links to really old tutorials from NeHe that are over 10 years old when I google around.

I have to have this feature in my engine, and it is taking top priority right now. This is using C++ and openGL 4.4 btw although I guess I can use DX as an intermediate stage if I need to

You can always use OpenCV to convert from a video file to a set of still frames.

If you're comfortable with only supporting Theora files, you could try out TheoraPlay which is a simple wrapper around libtheora and libvorbis. I can give you the class I wrote to further simplify the player.

On another note, I hope GL4 is not your minimum..

22 hours ago, midn said:

If you're comfortable with only supporting Theora files, you could try out TheoraPlay which is a simple wrapper around libtheora and libvorbis. I can give you the class I wrote to further simplify the player.

On another note, I hope GL4 is not your minimum..

Thanks! sure, I'll give theora a shot although I have heard about using Ffmpeg directly. 

This is for learning purposes, its not for release at GL4.4