Originally Posted by
master5001
Let me make sure I am understanding all of your facts correctly, shall we.
- You are being paid to write a program in which you have no earthly clue where to even begin.
- The functionality of your program seems to serve no real meaningful purpose (though it *almost* sounds to me like you are trying to decode sat feeds).
- You do not know how much your own time and effort is worth.
To answer these respectively (my rehashing of your questions, not your questions).
1. You can do what you are asking different various ways. I actually had to write my own AVI/MPEG decoder once. The vfw library is such a lifesaver in comparison to my nasty reverse-engineered library. You can use DX or OGL or whatever to output the video once you have decoded it. Consult the docs for whatever API you use for video to create the desired TV-out result.
2. Ask more questions as to how this program will even prove useful. It is pointless to write code that doesn't do anything important unless it either pays well enough to be worth your wasted skills or you are out to learn something. In this case, it may be worth the real-life programming experience. I would estimate the time to program something like this to be something like 45minutes to 1.5 hours. But on the other hand, I know my level of programming experience, and my level of experience with OGL, DX, my understanding of my own video drivers, and how to decode video streams. You may not know some of these things and you will spend the first few afternoons reading books, technical specs, and probably tutorial websites.
3. You are worth exactly what you feel worth. If someone asks you to spit out code you have written before and will probably copy and paste from another project, you are making substancial profit and even if you charge the same price as a project you enter blindly, you are spending less time on R&D and more time on features and extras. On the flip-side, when you do not have knowledge about something you spend more time reading than you do coding. Or you spend a great deal of time trying to debug. Is your time spent debugging more or less valuable than lets say someone scouring a grill at McDonalds? Is it as important as repairing a helocopter rotor? Just charge him a flat bid for the project instead of toying with hourly rates. Tell him you will do it for $x. You tell me how much it would cost to motivate you to do this task. Then tell him.