Need some Programming Advice from pro's

[jmoore2020]

whats a good language to learn that has strong Graphic image and video and audio manipulation features... such as writing programs to

- compress video and images (this is probably quite difficult i imagine)
- Convert file types.. jpg's to gif's etc..
- encode video from one format to another
- perform simple edit tasks like extract a frame
- have the ability to work with multiple file formats like .mov, mpg, mp3 .swf etc..

also I'd like to know which languages can handle this that are somewhat easy to learn (although learning curve is not really on the top of the list) ... and if possible cross platform like Java...
which was my initial thought.. but I'm unaware if it has these capabilities. Also which area's of math should i brush up on that would help me with these types of projects

any advice and information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a ton in advance. J Moore.

[TkTech]

Um. No language? Every language?

Programming languages don't come with features like that out of the box, you would need to dev a little into the file format and build your own tool, or download a library created by someone else.

C or C++ can do all of that which you have stated with relative ease, and I guarantee theres a preexisting lib for each case.

Almost any language can do what you've asked.

[Rothzael]

I agree, but some can do it a little easier than others. In C/C++, you get low-level access to everything. This is good, because you can get into the nitty-gritty of files and do whatever the hell you want. But it can get tedious and sometimes very difficult. You can get third-party libraries to do the stuff for you.

Other languages like C#/Java etc. have some multimedia-specific stuff shipped with them, so maybe you can check it out.

[vAC]

Look at MATLab and it's image processing toolbox, that's enought to solve your tasks and this is a good kit to learn matrix algebra