Libmpeg2

ABOUT LIBMPEG2

libmpeg2 is a free library for decoding mpeg-2 and mpeg-1 video
streams. It is released under the terms of the GPL license.

The main goals in libmpeg2 development are:

      *	Conformance - libmpeg2 is able to decode all mpeg streams that
	conform to certain restrictions: "constrained parameters" for
	mpeg-1, and "main profile" for mpeg-2. In practice, this is
	what most people are using. For streams that follow these
	restrictions, we believe libmpeg2 is 100% conformant to the
	mpeg standards - and we have a pretty extensive test suite to
	check this.

      *	Speed - there has been huge efforts there, and we believe
	libmpeg2 is the fastest library around for what it
	does. Please tell us if you find a faster one ! With typical
	video streams as found on DVD's, and doing only decoding with
	no display, you should be able to get about 110 fps on a
	PIII/666, or 150 fps on an Athlon/950. This is less than 20
	cycles per output pixel. In a real player program, the display
	routines will probably take as much time as the actual
	decoding !

      *	Portability - most of the code is written in C, and when we
	use platform-specific optimizations (typically assembly
	routines, currently used for the motion compensation and the
	inverse cosine transform stages) we always have a generic C
	routine to fall back on.  This should be portable to all
	architectures - at least we have heard reports from people
	running this code on x86, ppc, sparc, arm and
	sh4. Assembly-optimized implementations are available on x86
	(MMX) and ppc (altivec) architectures. Ultrasparc (VIS) is
	probably the next on the list - we'll see.

OS4 note: This is a generic PPC only port.

      *	Reuseability - we do not want libmpeg2 to include any
	project-specific code, but it should still include enough
	features to be used by very diverse projects. We are only
	starting to get there - the best way to help here is to give
	us some feedback !

The project homepage is at http://libmpeg2.sourceforge.net/