Extend a video player vs. Write a video player

[OpaqueMegane]

Hello!

For my work, I've been tasked with writing a player to play nearly raw video we get from our instruments. There's a little header, sometimes it's bayer coded, sometimes only some of the bits of the 2 bytes per pixel are meaningful, but essentially, I need to just play a stream of bitmaps. Writing a very simple player wouldn't be a super big deal, but they want a number of features such as adjusting contrast and flipping, and scrubbing. They already have a hacky player but they want something more streamlined and convenient. Would I be better off writing support for my format into an open source player like VLC, or somehow writing a general codec? What kind of codec/plugin would be simplest to write? What terms should I be using to search when I'm trying to figure this out?

I don't know much about this stuff, and I feel like anything I'm going to come up with on my own is going to be low quality, and or reinventing the wheel. Here's what I've tried:

* I've looked into writing a "direct media object" (DMO), and a media foundation transform (MFT) but it what I read seemed to suggest that these were for dealing with already existing standards and compressed stuff.

* I've also started to modify very simple example player (no ui, just a hardcoded path) leveraging Simple DirectiveMedia Layer (SDL)

* I've done a fair amount or searching along the lines of "custom video format" or "write custom video codec" but I've not found anything especially promising.

Obviously, there are tradeoffs to consider, and I can't expect a complete revelatory explanation from anyone, but I would appreciate any suggestions, no matter how general.

Thanks in advance!