add audio support for playing video files

[dkbast]

• it would be awesome to have the option to play the audio as well,
• consideration: maybe only play audio when enabled with a flag

[hzeller]

Adding audio will open a whole can of worms as it might be hard to have an implementation that works on Linux (and the various flavors from simple ALSA to jack etc) and MacOS.
If someone knows a platform independent way to implement this, a pull request is greatly appreciated.

[dkbast]

I was just going over this again and did a little bit of research - apparently there is an audio library which works on most platforms called "sox": https://sourceforge.net/p/sox/code/ci/master/tree/
Since I haven't been working with C/C++ in about 15 years I don't think I'm going to be able to solve this on my own, but I would be open & interested in pairing anytime you like.

Update: Maybe it would be easier to add terminal image protocol support to mpv which is a mediaplayer that can also output to the terminal: mpv-player/mpv#9605

[ericonr]

OpenAL or Portaudio might be options, I believe. If I have the time, I might try to look into this.

[RGBCube]

PulseAudio for Linux would work, since most people are either using that or PipeWire which implements compatibility layers for Pulse and Alsa.

MacOS is easy since it has a single Audio API. There must be a library for C++ that implements all this, don't know any names since I'm not that familiar with the C++ ecosystem.

[VSuryaPrashanth]

It might not help but I have found a simple workaround,
In MacOS we have a terminal command afplay which can be used to play audio headless so we simply run both the commands in parallel. and to cancel them simultaneously we can trap the ctr+c and manually pkill them.

#!/bin/zsh
trap '' INT
player () (
   afplay $@ & timg $@
)
player $@
pkill timg
pkill afplay

instead of afplay we can use any other terminal headless audio player as well and if it has output then simply we can command $@ >/dev/null 2>/dev/null and ofcourse we have to assign a proper pid and all.
This is obviously a hack and gives no regards to the video-audio sync. but if you only want to have a quick view then this might help.