3D picture viewer

I want to create a picture viewer with 3d effects. For instance, I would like to specify a local directory and have the application load the images and texture them to quads and have 3d transition effects while switching between images. I know enough OpenGL to know that this is not very difficult. However, I imagine there are game engines built on top of OpenGL that would simplify this process even more (loading different image formats, lighting, camera control, etc.) I would eventually like the ability to also play video files within my 3d application. I have had little luck finding a suitable library for easily playing videos within an OpenGL context. Please suggest high level api’s, game engines, other rendering engines that would suit my needs. If you are familiar with PicLens, this is very close to what I am wanting to create (I believe they use Direct3d). Programming language is not an issue and Windows or Linux platforms will work. Thanks for any information!

Hi!
PicLens is great I think. But it must use OpenGL, because it is availible for Linux and Mac too.

I doubt you need a game engine for your application. There are several libraries for loading images. Developer’s Image Library (DevIL) is a good one and FreeImage is another. They are open source and available for Linux, Mac and Windows AFAIK.

Loading and playing video files is a bit more complicated. All I know is that there is a framework for Linux which is called GStreamer that allows you to play video files. Don’t know the details or how well does it work with OpenGL.

The only cross-platform video-streaming system that I know of is Phonon. It may be GPL (instead of LGPL), so you might have to open-source your program to use it.