Just thought i’d let all you devoted readers know, i just released my second iPhone app on iTunes, vidsplit.

vidsplit is a simple picture puzzle game with an added twist: instead of a picture, you have to piece together a full-motion video. With a grand total of two difficulty settings and 3 puzzles, it should keep pretty much any puzzle enthusiast entertained for hours.

On the technical side of things, vidsplit is basically a really souped up fork of anim8gif. Instead of animated gifs however, i’m using far higher quality PVR compressed videos.

Why PVR? Well, it really is the only thing you can use to get smooth video playback, apart from the hardware mpeg decoding chips which sadly aren’t accessible using the SDK. All other methods and texture formats are far too slow to get any acceptable playback speed.

For the curious, you might also be interested to know the video frames are basically 256×256 pixels in size, stretched to the dimensions of the screen. Any bigger and the video files would balloon in size. Any smaller and the video would look like complete mush, so it’s pretty much an acceptable sweet spot in terms of quality.

The decoder is pretty simple. Every frame, a PVR texture is read from the video file (basically concatenated PVR textures) and uploaded as an OpenGLES texture. Ad-infimum. It really couldn’t be any simpler than that!

As for the actual graphical interface, i’m using a custom solution based on my kitten game engine.

To conclude

So what are you waiting for, why not buy it from itunes? :)