====================================================== THE MPEG-FAQ [Version 2.0 - 9. May 1993] ====================================================== PHADE SOFTWARE Leibnizstr. 30, 1000 Berlin 12, GERMANY Inh. Frank Gadegast Fon/Fax: +49 30 3128103 phade@cs.tu-berlin.de =========================================================================== This is my summary about MPEG. It's the third publication of this file. Lots of errors have been removed, and lots of information has been added (which has surely brought other errors with it, see Murphy's Law). This third addition is VERY different to the previous ones. First: Some sections have been removed, because the are old or there was nothing changing. So if you are NOT familiar with the theme, get the the last MPEG-FAQ (Version 1.1) via ftp from host: ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de (130.149.17.7) file: /pub/msdos/windows3/graphics/mpegfa11.zip This new FAQ will be there soon too, as 'mpegfa20.zip'. Second: The E-MAIL-ORDER-SERVICE has been removed, because it was causing to much traffic on my account. The damon HAS been changed, it will send a message back, saying, that the service has been removed. Right now, there are enough placed where to get the desired files from (via Internet, E-Mails to others, ftp, mail-access etc.) Third: The people where more interested to get the complete archives. Therefore the TRAIL-PACK-Service is still running. I'm still collecting EVERY info, video, sound or program. Get the Trail-Pack ! You should read carefully through this FAQ this time, cause lots of new information is hidden in all the sections. F.e. news about Dos, Amiga-, Atari-, OS/2-, Windows-, Windows-NT, VMS- and Mac-Players arrived !!! This summary is devided in 12 parts: I | WHAT IS MPEG ? II | PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE III | PUBLIC-DOMAIN SOFTWARE OR SHAREWARE IV | MPEG-RELATED HARDWARE V | MAILBOX-ACCESS VI | FTP-ACCESS (PD) VII | MAIL-ORDER VIII | RETRIEVED MAIL OR ARTICLES IX | ADDITIONAL INFORMATION X | WHERE TO FIND MORE INFOS XI | NEWS XII | QUESTIONS I add my comments in brackets [], lines (---- or ====) seperate the chapters. Please try and find out more information yourself. I had enough to do by getting and preparing this information. And only bother me with file- request if its not possible for you to get it somewhere else !!! If you want to contribute to this FAQ in any way, please email me (probably by replying to this posting). My email address is: phade@cs.tu-berlin.de Or send any additional information via fax or e-mail. The fax is only reachable between Mo.-Fr. from 10.00-13.00 and from 15.00-18.30 german time. Phade (Frank Gadegast) DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE NAMED COMPANIES, NO BUSINESS, IT'S JUST MY PERSONAL INTERESTED. THESE COMPANIES ARE NAMED, BECAUSE, THEY ARE THE FIRST BRINGING MULTIMEDIA TO THE PC- WORLD. SURE I MAKE ADVERTS FOR THEM WITH THIS FAQ, BUT HOPE- FULLY YOU, AS A READER OF THIS FAQ, WILL FORCE THEM TO PRODUCE MORE AND BETTER PRODUCTS. =========================================================================== I | WHAT IS MPEG ? =================== From comp.compression Mon Oct 19 15:38:38 1992 Sender: news@chorus.chorus.fr Author: Mark Adler [71] Introduction to MPEG (long) What is MPEG? Does it have anything to do with JPEG? Then what's JBIG and MHEG? What has MPEG accomplished? So how does MPEG I work? What about the audio compression? So how much does it compress? What's phase II? When will all this be finished? How do I join MPEG? How do I get the documents, like the MPEG I draft? [ There is no newer version of this part so far. Whoever wants to update ] [ this description, should do the job and send it over. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: [71] Introduction to MPEG (long) Written by Mark Adler . Q. What is MPEG? A. MPEG is a group of people that meet under ISO (the International Standards Organization) to generate standards for digital video (sequences of images in time) and audio compression. In particular, they define a compressed bit stream, which implicitly defines a decompressor. However, the compression algorithms are up to the individual manufacturers, and that is where proprietary advantage is obtained within the scope of a publicly available international standard. MPEG meets roughly four times a year for roughly a week each time. In between meetings, a great deal of work is done by the members, so it doesn't all happen at the meetings. The work is organized and planned at the meetings. Q. So what does MPEG stand for? A. Moving Pictures Experts Group. Q. Does it have anything to do with JPEG? A. Well, it sounds the same, and they are part of the same subcommittee of ISO along with JBIG and MHEG, and they usually meet at the same place at the same time. However, they are different sets of people with few or no common individual members, and they have different charters and requirements. JPEG is for still image compression. Q. Then what's JBIG and MHEG? A. Sorry I mentioned them. Ok, I'll simply say that JBIG is for binary image compression (like faxes), and MHEG is for multi-media data standards (like integrating stills, video, audio, text, etc.). For an introduction to JBIG, see question 74 below. Q. Ok, I'll stick to MPEG. What has MPEG accomplished? A. So far (as of January 1992), they have completed the "Committee Draft" of MPEG phase I, colloquially called MPEG I. It defines a bit stream for compressed video and audio optimized to fit into a bandwidth (data rate) of 1.5 Mbits/s. This rate is special because it is the data rate of (uncompressed) audio CD's and DAT's. The draft is in three parts, video, audio, and systems, where the last part gives the integration of the audio and video streams with the proper timestamping to allow synchronization of the two. They have also gotten well into MPEG phase II, whose task is to define a bitstream for video and audio coded at around 3 to 10 Mbits/s. Q. So how does MPEG I work? A. First off, it starts with a relatively low resolution video sequence (possibly decimated from the original) of about 352 by 240 frames by 30 frames/s (US--different numbers for Europe), but original high (CD) quality audio. The images are in color, but converted to YUV space, and the two chrominance channels (U and V) are decimated further to 176 by 120 pixels. It turns out that you can get away with a lot less resolution in those channels and not notice it, at least in "natural" (not computer generated) images. The basic scheme is to predict motion from frame to frame in the temporal direction, and then to use DCT's (discrete cosine transforms) to organize the redundancy in the spatial directions. The DCT's are done on 8x8 blocks, and the motion prediction is done in the luminance (Y) channel on 16x16 blocks. In other words, given the 16x16 block in the current frame that you are trying to code, you look for a close match to that block in a previous or future frame (there are backward prediction modes where later frames are sent first to allow interpolating between frames). The DCT coefficients (of either the actual data, or the difference between this block and the close match) are "quantized", which means that you divide them by some value to drop bits off the bottom end. Hopefully, many of the coefficients will then end up being zero. The quantization can change for every "macroblock" (a macroblock is 16x16 of Y and the corresponding 8x8's in both U and V). The results of all of this, which include the DCT coefficients, the motion vectors, and the quantization parameters (and other stuff) is Huffman coded using fixed tables. The DCT coefficients have a special Huffman table that is "two-dimensional" in that one code specifies a run-length of zeros and the non-zero value that ended the run. Also, the motion vectors and the DC DCT components are DPCM (subtracted from the last one) coded. Q. So is each frame predicted from the last frame? A. No. The scheme is a little more complicated than that. There are three types of coded frames. There are "I" or intra frames. They are simply a frame coded as a still image, not using any past history. You have to start somewhere. Then there are "P" or predicted frames. They are predicted from the most recently reconstructed I or P frame. (I'm describing this from the point of view of the decompressor.) Each macroblock in a P frame can either come with a vector and difference DCT coefficients for a close match in the last I or P, or it can just be "intra" coded (like in the I frames) if there was no good match. Lastly, there are "B" or bidirectional frames. They are predicted from the closest two I or P frames, one in the past and one in the future. You search for matching blocks in those frames, and try three different things to see which works best. (Now I have the point of view of the compressor, just to confuse you.) You try using the forward vector, the backward vector, and you try averaging the two blocks from the future and past frames, and subtracting that from the block being coded. If none of those work well, you can intra- code the block. The sequence of decoded frames usually goes like: IBBPBBPBBPBBIBBPBBPB... Where there are 12 frames from I to I (for US and Japan anyway.) This is based on a random access requirement that you need a starting point at least once every 0.4 seconds or so. The ratio of P's to B's is based on experience. Of course, for the decoder to work, you have to send that first P *before* the first two B's, so the compressed data stream ends up looking like: 0xx312645... where those are frame numbers. xx might be nothing (if this is the true starting point), or it might be the B's of frames -2 and -1 if we're in the middle of the stream somewhere. You have to decode the I, then decode the P, keep both of those in memory, and then decode the two B's. You probably display the I while you're decoding the P, and display the B's as you're decoding them, and then display the P as you're decoding the next P, and so on. Q. You've got to be kidding. A. No, really! Q. Hmm. Where did they get 352x240? A. That derives from the CCIR-601 digital television standard which is used by professional digital video equipment. It is (in the US) 720 by 243 by 60 fields (not frames) per second, where the fields are interlaced when displayed. (It is important to note though that fields are actually acquired and displayed a 60th of a second apart.) The chrominance channels are 360 by 243 by 60 fields a second, again interlaced. This degree of chrominance decimation (2:1 in the horizontal direction) is called 4:2:2. The source input format for MPEG I, called SIF, is CCIR-601 decimated by 2:1 in the horizontal direction, 2:1 in the time direction, and an additional 2:1 in the chrominance vertical direction. And some lines are cut off to make sure things divide by 8 or 16 where needed. Q. What if I'm in Europe? A. For 50 Hz display standards (PAL, SECAM) change the number of lines in a field from 243 or 240 to 288, and change the display rate to 50 fields/s or 25 frames/s. Similarly, change the 120 lines in the decimated chrominance channels to 144 lines. Since 288*50 is exactly equal to 240*60, the two formats have the same source data rate. Q. You didn't mention anything about the audio compression. A. Oh, right. Well, I don't know as much about the audio compression. Basically they use very carefully developed psychoacoustic models derived from experiments with the best obtainable listeners to pick out pieces of the sound that you can't hear. There are what are called "masking" effects where, for example, a large component at one frequency will prevent you from hearing lower energy parts at nearby frequencies, where the relative energy vs. frequency that is masked is described by some empirical curve. There are similar temporal masking effects, as well as some more complicated interactions where a temporal effect can unmask a frequency, and vice-versa. The sound is broken up into spectral chunks with a hybrid scheme that combines sine transforms with subband transforms, and the psychoacoustic model written in terms of those chunks. Whatever can be removed or reduced in precision is, and the remainder is sent. It's a little more complicated than that, since the bits have to be allocated across the bands. And, of course, what is sent is entropy coded. Q. So how much does it compress? A. As I mentioned before, audio CD data rates are about 1.5 Mbits/s. You can compress the same stereo program down to 256 Kbits/s with no loss in discernable quality. (So they say. For the most part it's true, but every once in a while a weird thing might happen that you'll notice. However the effect is very small, and it takes a listener trained to notice these particular types of effects.) That's about 6:1 compression. So, a CD MPEG I stream would have about 1.25 MBits/s left for video. The number I usually see though is 1.15 MBits/s (maybe you need the rest for the system data stream). You can then calculate the video compression ratio from the numbers here to be about 26:1. If you step back and think about that, it's little short of a miracle. Of course, it's lossy compression, but it can be pretty hard sometimes to see the loss, if you're comparing the SIF original to the SIF decompressed. There is, however, a very noticeable loss if you're coming from CCIR-601 and have to decimate to SIF, but that's another matter. I'm not counting that in the 26:1. The standard also provides for other bit rates ranging from 32Kbits/s for a single channel, up to 448 Kbits/s for stereo. Q. What's phase II? A. As I said, there is a considerable loss of quality in going from CCIR-601 to SIF resolution. For entertainment video, it's simply not acceptable. You want to use more bits and code all or almost all the CCIR-601 data. From subjective testing at the Japan meeting in November 1991, it seems that 4 MBits/s can give very good quality compared to the original CCIR-601 material. The objective of phase II is to define a bit stream optimized for these resolutions and bit rates. Q. Why not just scale up what you're doing with MPEG I? A. The main difficulty is the interlacing. The simplest way to extend MPEG I to interlaced material is to put the fields together into frames (720x486x30/s). This results in bad motion artifacts that stem from the fact that moving objects are in different places in the two fields, and so don't line up in the frames. Compressing and decompressing without taking that into account somehow tends to muddle the objects in the two different fields. The other thing you might try is to code the even and odd field streams separately. This avoids the motion artifacts, but as you might imagine, doesn't get very good compression since you are not using the redundancy between the even and odd fields where there is not much motion (which is typically most of image). Or you can code it as a single stream of fields. Or you can interpolate lines. Or, etc. etc. There are many things you can try, and the point of MPEG II is to figure out what works well. MPEG II is not limited to consider only derivations of MPEG I. There were several non-MPEG I-like schemes in the competition in November, and some aspects of those algorithms may or may not make it into the final standard for entertainment video compression. Q. So what works? A. Basically, derivations of MPEG I worked quite well, with one that used wavelet subband coding instead of DCT's that also worked very well. Also among the worked-very-well's was a scheme that did not use B frames at all, just I and P's. All of them, except maybe one, did some sort of adaptive frame/field coding, where a decision is made on a macroblock basis as to whether to code that one as one frame macroblock or as two field macroblocks. Some other aspects are how to code I-frames--some suggest predicting the even field from the odd field. Or you can predict evens from evens and odds or odds from evens and odds or any field from any other field, etc. Q. So what works? A. Ok, we're not really sure what works best yet. The next step is to define a "test model" to start from, that incorporates most of the salient features of the worked-very-well proposals in a simple way. Then experiments will be done on that test model, making a mod at a time, and seeing what makes it better and what makes it worse. Example experiments are, B's or no B's, DCT vs. wavelets, various field prediction modes, etc. The requirements, such as implementation cost, quality, random access, etc. will all feed into this process as well. Q. When will all this be finished? A. I don't know. I'd have to hope in about a year or less. Q. How do I join MPEG? A. You don't join MPEG. You have to participate in ISO as part of a national delegation. How you get to be part of the national delegation is up to each nation. I only know the U.S., where you have to attend the corresponding ANSI meetings to be able to attend the ISO meetings. Your company or institution has to be willing to sink some bucks into travel since, naturally, these meetings are held all over the world. (For example, Paris, Santa Clara, Kurihama Japan, Singapore, Haifa Israel, Rio de Janeiro, London, etc.) Q. Well, then how do I get the documents, like the MPEG I draft? A. MPEG is a draft ISO standard. It's exact name is ISO CD 11172. The draft consists of three parts: System, Video, and Audio. The System part (11172-1) deals with synchronization and multiplexing of audio-visual information, while the Video (11172-2) and Audio part (11172-3) address the video and the audio compression techniques respectively. You may order it from your national standards body (e.g. ANSI in the USA) or buy it from companies like OMNICOM phone +44 438 742424 FAX +44 438 740154 =========================================================================== II.1 | PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE ============================= Xing Technology Corporation PO Box 950 Voice: 805-473-0145 456 Carpenter Canyon FAX: 805-473-0147 Arroyo Grande, CA 93420 Xing products include: MPEG Motion video capture/encode and decode. JPEG Photo image encode and decode. Video capture boards and associated software for both JPEG and MPEG. Microsoft Windows Applications, DOS Applications, and Software Developers Kits are available for JPEG and MPEG. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the latest in Frame Grabber technology, the PC-Hurricane, a realtime true color frame grabber, which can digitize about 500 frames in realtime (25 frames/sec) into Extended Memory (32 MBytes). So it gives you 20 seconds of full-motion video on the PC. These 320 frames can be saved with one command to the harddrive and can then be processed to a MPEG file with just one other command. You can then join several 20 seconds MPEG clips together to a whole MPEG movie with the MPEG utilities. PC-Hurricane, only available from Ingenierbuero Gatz & Hartmann, GERMANY. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- II.2 | ------- Ingenieurbuero Gatz & Hartmann, Fehrbelliner Str. 32, 1000 Berlin 20, GERMANY Tel: 030- 344 23 66 or 030-375 55 68 FAX: 030- 344 92 79 or 030-375 56 55 email to: leo@zelator.in-berlin.de (Stefan Hartmann) The MPEG Encoder is available starting from 349.-DM incl. VAT. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- PC-Hurricane, only available from Ingenierbuero Gatz & Hartmann. It is available for a price of 699.-DM inclusive 14 % VAT. Here comes the technical info about the new moviegrabber(tm) PC-Hurricane(tm): It is a hicolor color YUV (4:1:1) realtime video movie digitizer which can store 25 frames/sec(PAL) or 30 frames/sec(NTSC) into Expanded Memory. It has support for ET4000 Hicolor and true color boards. The software is a userfriendly DOS software, which displays the incoming video signal in almost realtime (about 5-10 frames/sec) on a ET4000 Hicolor board in 32768 colors/pixel. This is okay for video purposes, cause the noise inside a video movie almost does already the dithering to a true color quality (simualar to 24 bit quality). If you don't have a Hicolor card inside your PC, then there is also a 256 color version driver, which displays the video signal in almost realtime in 3-3-2 color quantisation (still the TGA pics are saved as 16 bit Hicolor/pixel, so quality from the saved output is the same as in the Hicolor software driver). If the sequence arrives, which you wanna digitize, just hit the space key. Then it is digitized into the Expanded Memory in realtime with 25 or 30 frames/sec maximum rate. This can be adjusted to 12.5 or 8 or 4 frames/sec! During this storing process, you will not see any signal on your VGA monitor, but if the RAM is filled with e.g.396 frames at 320x240, then you can already watch the digitized movie play of the Expanded Memory! It plays in slow motion the YUV coded fields to the SVGA card via the ISA bus. This gives a real slow motion Hicolor digital movie out of the RAM ! So if you have 32 MBytes of Ram on your motherboard, you can be happy. Then you can store about 16 seconds of realtime MPEG resolution 320x240 true color video with one shot ! With the enclosed software you can save this with one command to single TGA pics onto the harddisk or save it as a complete Hicolor movie (uncompressed, big file size). PC-Hurricane also digitizes the resolutions: 384x288, 360x240, 320x240 and 320x200. So max. resolution is 1 PAL field (384x288). Field digitisation is preferred, cause it gives no Interlace artifacts, due to motion... So if you want to make a FLI file out of the 16 seconds sequence, no problem, just start DTA17e (Dave's Targa Animator) and it produces a FLI animation file out of the single TGA pics. Also, if you have the Xing Technology software only MPEG encoder, it will be possible to compress this about 400 single TARGA(tm) pics with just one second command to a MPEG movie ! So you have in about 5 minutes of work a ready to display MPEG movie ! PC-Hurricane has NTSC/PAL switchable. So it can also digitize NTSC video. It has Video(FBAS) and Y/C(SVHS/Hi8) inputs. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- MPEG 2.0 for windows3.x is now available ! It is the digital Video player via a software only solution ! It displays in a 320x240 window under win3.x a realtime decompressed digital video ! Decompression is done only by software and it reaches 30 frames/sec on a 486 PC ! The new version has a very enhanced picture quality, because the compression rate with the encoder can now be adjusted ! The very new thing is the WAV-Sound support ! So if you have a soundcard inside your PC [or the speaker-drv installed !], you will have a real video-clip with accompagning sound ! They currently sell 3 demo disks with the full featured Player, version 2.0 and lots of animations on the disks. It is available for 39.-DM over here in Germany, which is 26 US$. [ It does no sounds over the speaker-drv (works only with sound-card), ] [ does now recognize Windows 3.1, and does OLE, but only if you buy ] [ the MCI-driver. Works for nearly every card under 640x480x256. Works ] [ with ET-4000 under 1024x768x256 (only with small fonts) too. ] [ ATTENTION !!! THIS ONE IS NOT UP TO DATE ANYMORE !!! ] [======================================================================] [ This player is the one, you can get now for free from Xing's ] [ BBS or find on several ftp-servers. This player was an offer to get ] [ this player even before it was available for the public-domain. Thnx ] [ to Stefan ! ] [ Here the description of the PD-Player : ] MFW.EXE Version 2.0 1.1 General Description MFW can be started from the DOS command line or as a "run" command from within Windows. From the DOS prompt, enter WIN MFW. From the Windows FILE RUN dialog, enter MFW. Using either of the two command line methods, additional command parameters can be passed to the program for customizing its startup. Valid command line parameters will take precedence over the customization parameters saved in the MFW.INI file. Invalid command line parameters will be ignored as if missing altogether. The MFW.INI file provides default startup values for each missing command parameter except the optional file name. The MFW.INI file is updated at user discretion from menu options selected while running MFW. [ ATTENTION ! SEVERAL BUGS ARE KNOWN FOR THIS PLAYER !! ] [=========================================================================] [ The player doesn't detect where it resided, by checking the argv[0] ] [ argument (complete pathname !). ] [ So, if you start the player via double-click on a .mpg-File from the ] [ FILEMAN.EXE (or similar), the player doesn't find it's MFW.INI-File. It ] [ can't read its system then, and the hole thing is fu**ed !! ] [ Or the player doesn't find his .INI-File, thinks that this was the ] [ first time it was started and: ] [ LEAVES A NEW MFW.INI-File in the current directory !!! ] [ Not in the one the player is, no ! In the current one. So my movies are ] [ in g:\mpeg\movies, the player is somewhere under c:\windows.31\mpeg, I ] [ double-click on the .mpg-Movie and get a new MFW.INI in g:\mpeg\movie ! ] [-------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ Now the second 'maybe not so bad' bug: [ The description says, to put the corresponding DLL-Files in the SYSTEM- ] [ directory. That's NOT neccessary, cause the DLL-loading-API-function ] [ will look through the path-variable and try to load the DLL's from ] [ there. ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- BTW, the encoder still sells for 349.-DM and the MCI-driver for 199.-DM [ The MCI-driver is nice, because it allows you to include movies in ] [ other documents. But it includes only the MPLAYER.EXE-icon in the ] [ document (not the first picture of the movie), the movie runs at ] [ whatever position (not where the icon is !), when you double-click it. ] [ Xing should have a close look at Microsoft's AVI-driver ;o) (but there ] [ movies are incredible slow and small, compared to MPEG :o( ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 bit to TV converter box which is a box connected outside of the PC to the SVGA card via its VGA connector. There must be a TSR program run in the background to change automatically the scanning frequencies of the SVGA board. This works also very well with win3.1. It supports up to 800x600x 65K colors (only PAL) and 640x480 with 24 bits color (true color) on the Genoa 7900 ET4000 SVGA board. It has Video (FBAS) and Y/C (SVHS/HI8) outputs. There is also a version of this box with additional RGB output, so you get the best picture quality on a TV-set with SCART - RGB-inputs.. The VGA Monitor is also connected to the 24 Bit to TV converter box, so if you don't start the driver software, your system is like normal: You see the picture on your SVGA monitor. The DC-power comes from the keyboard connector, so you don't have to fiddle around with AC-DC-aptor power supplies ! Just don't start the driver software, if you don't need video out ! The box doesn't interfere with your daily work. Just forget it behind you PC. If you need video out, just start the 2 KBytes driver software and then you can toggle between video out and VGA monitor display with a hot key ! The driver software is adapted to SVGA FLIC-files from Autodesk Animator PRO to give a 640x288 x256 colors Fullscreen-Overscan display on PAL TV- sets. This works by using double scanning with 50 Hz Non-Interlace ! Every scanline from the 288 is scanned twice, so it gives 640x576 Fullscreen display ! (with no flicker) This way you can record your favourite SVGA animations to tape without seeing any black borders ! There is also a NTSC version available, which works only up to 640x480 with 16, 256 ,32K , 65 K and 24 bits colors ! On NTSC model the 640x480 mode is already Fullscreen ! It also works with the new Hicolor FLI player, so you can play and record hicolor animation directly from a RAMdisk to VCR tape. You don't need NO single frame accurate expensive VCR anymore ! Cause it works also with win3.1, you can record all your daily windows application work to video tape ! If you have a presentation program like Microsoft Powerpoint, no problem ! Just record your presentation to video tape to show it via video cassette to everyone, who has a VCR ! In windows the 24 bit to TV-box works in 50 or 60 Hz Interlace to display the 640x480 or 800x600 (only PAL) scanlines. This gives a little flicker on Menu-buttons, which have only very small horizontal lines with big contrast in color. So use an appropriate color palette under windows to reduce flicker.. With the Y/C output (SVHS/Hi8) you almost get SVGA monitor quality on your video tape ! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VGA2TV adaptor. This is an internal board which is hooked inside the PC to the feature connector of the VGA card. So the VGA or SVGA board must have a feature connector ! The VGA2TV samples the contens of the VGA RAM into its own dual ported RAM and gives it out with the Video scanning frequencies to its Video (FBAS) or Y/C output. It also has a Genlock possibility. So it can be used to do titling in front of a holiday movie video tape running in the background of the computer graphics titles ! Input of the external video source could also be FBAS or Y/C. This unit is called M2150 for the PAL version. M2100 is the NTSC version. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VGA2TV PRO with integrated Flicker fixer. This is the new release of the VGA2TV board. It has also a flicker filter for making the Interlace flicker much less visible. It also has OverScan/Underscan feature and the position of the screen on the TV set could be controlled via software. This board is of course more expensive than the older VGA2TV, but still either cards are sold. The new one is called M2200 . Both max resolutions to convert with these VGA2TV boards are 640x480 with 256 colors ! It has the advantage, that it does not need any software ! Just plug and it plays ! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Productlist from Gatz & Hartmann ================================ Genoa 7900 SVGA 24 bit true color Multimedia Graphik-Karte.... 299.-DM 24 bit to TV Konverter Box, passend zur Genoa 7900 Karte.......349.-DM Genoa 7900 und 24 bit to TV Box, im Bundle.....................629.-DM 24 bit to TV Box mit zusaetzlichem RGB-Video Ausgang auf Scart.549.-DM VGA2TV Genoa Genlock-Karte,intern, Computergrafik ueber Video..998.-DM VGA2TV PRO, Profi-Version mit Flicker-fixer,etc...............1599.-DM PC-Titler Standard,Video Vertitelungs-Software fuer VGA-Karten.349.-DM PC-Titler Deluxe, Profi-Version vom PC Titler, mehr Effekte....649.-DM The Video Workshop, PC gesteuerter Video-Schnittplatz.........1599.-DM The Video Workshop Lite, Druckerport gesteuerter Video-Schnitt.999.-DM MPEG Encoder VTM, digitales Video per Software,fuer TGA-pics...349,-DM MPEG MCI-win3.x-driver,Treiber zum Einbinden von MPEG-clips ...199.-DM MPEG 2.0 Demo, 3 Disketten mit dem neuen WAV-support player ....39.-DM PC-Hurricane,25 Bilder/sec realtime MPEG true color Digitizer..699.-DM FG-02 , Hicolor DTP Framegrabber, 512x512 pixel Videodigitizer.499.-DM VT-Express,sehr schneller JPEG-Bild viewer, ca. 1.2 sec/Bild...349.-DM Hicolor(32768Farben) Animations-Software f. TGA-Animationen ...149.-DM [ Looks like, if I don't have to translate this ;o) ] [ Well, I know, looks like advert, but they are the only ones, that ] [ produce MPEG-Hard- and Software for this price. Hereby I declare, ] [ everybody can send me their lists, too. I will publish them in the ] [ next FAQ. Current Dollar-DeutschMark-course is: 1$ = 1,67 DM !!! ] =========================================================================== III | PUBLIC-DOMAIN-SOFTWARE OR SHAREWARE ========================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.1 | DOS ------------ [ This is the NEW Xing-Dos-Player ! ] The MPEG-Player 'MPLAY.EXE' from Xing Technologies is included in the 'MPEGXING.LZH'-file. Hi, this is the new Full-Screen DOS only MPEG player from Xing Technology. Use it under DOS: mpeg name.mpg This will give a fullscreen 320x200 display with 256 colors. You can play with it the Xing MPEG files which are normally 320x240 screen size. With this shareware player you have 40 scanlines less, so upgrade to the upcoming XMode DOS player which will have 240 scanlines and will also support WAV audio with it. For more info just contact Xing Technology under: 805-473-0145 (voice) or 805-473-0147 (fax) (in the USA) Best regards, Stefan Hartmann email to: harti@mikro.ee.tu-berlin.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is another player called PLAYMPEG.ZIP including two executables MPEG128.EXE and MPEG250.EXE (for 128 and 250 colors) by: PLAYMPG v. 0.9 - Jan. 1993 - by Giampiero Caprino, Olivetti, Italy. This is a pre-release version being distributed for evaluation The modified berkeley-source-code is avilable as MPEGSRC.ZIP. [ The user-interface is more comfortable than the MPEG.EXE one, but ] [ these players here are terrible slow. Anyway, it shows how easy ] [ you can adapt the berkeley-code (see below) and port it to other ] [ systems. And it works on ALL VGA-cards !!! ] [ Hopefully, Rowe, Patel and Smith include this additional code in ] [ the next version of their MPEG-Player to get a system-undependent ] [ distribution. ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ A new implementation of the berkeley-code for DOS. This code is ] [ available for AT286/386 and the files are named MPEG286.ZIP and ] [ MPEG386.ZIP . ] MPEG translator and player V0.00 This is the 286 version of the MPEG traslation and playback routines. I would like to thank Giampero Caprino for providing the VGA routines and the authors of the Mpeg standard Unix distribution for most of this code. To play back an animation you first must translate it to a raw data file. To do this type mpeg input-file output-file You will see it counting off the frames as it runs. When it is finished type playback input-file Where input-file to playback corresponds to the output-file of mpeg.exe. The delay value defaults to 0, but this is probably too fast. On a 486sx with no delay, I get just over 20 frames per second. Try values between 0 and 200. Note that several dithering options are not supported: 2x2, hybrid2, and gray. Perhaps I will fix this in the future. Also please note that if the MPEG animation loops, the translator will happily write a file as big as your disk drive. Hit CTRL-C to stop it. This program is freeware. I have included the original Unix man page and docs for the MPEG player. Greg Ennis 93gke@cs.williams.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: stefan@lis.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de (Stefan Eckart) Subject: dmpeg10.zip info: Another DOS MPEG decoder/player posted Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 08:53:14 GMT I have posted a DOS MPEG decoder/player to alt.binaries.pictures.utilities. Here is a short description and some technical information, taken from the accompanying documentation: DMPEG V1.0 Public Domain MPEG decoder by Stefan Eckart 0. Features =========== DMPEG/DMPLAY is another MPEG decoder/player for the PC: - decodes (nearly) the full MPEG video standard (I,P,B frames, frame size up to at least 352x240 supported) - saves decoded sequence in 8 or 24bit raw file for later display - optional on-screen display during decoding (requires VGA) - several dithering options: ordered dither, Floyd-Steinberg, grayscale - color-space selection - runs under DOS, 640KB RAM, no MS-Windows required - very compact (small code / small data models, 16 bit arithmetic) - real time display of the raw file by a separate player for VGA and many Super-VGAs ... 4. Technical information ======================== The player is a rather straightforward implementation of the MPEG spec [1]. The IDCT is based on the Chen-Wang 13 multiplication algorithm [2] (not quite the optimum, I know). Blocks with not more than eight non-zero coefficients use a non-separated direct multiply-accumulate 2D-IDCT (sounds great, doesn't it?), which turned out to be faster than a 'fast' algorithm in this (quite common) case. Dithering is pretty standard. Main difference to the Berkeley decoder (except for the fewer number of supported algorithms) is the use of 256 instead of 128 colors, the (default) option to use a restricted color-space and the implementation of a color saturation dominant ordered dither. This leads to a significantly superior quality of the dithered image (I claim, judge yourself). Restricted color-space means that the U and V components are clipped to +/-0.25 (instead of +/-0.5) and the display color-space points are distributed over this restricted space. Since the distance between color-space points is thus reduced by a factor of two, the color resolution is doubled at the expense of not being able to represent fully saturated colors. Saturation dominant ordered dither is a method by which a color, lying somewhere between the points of the display color space, is approximated by primarily alternating between two points of constant hue instead of constant saturation. This yields subjectivly better quality due to the lower sensitivity of the human viewing system to saturation changes than to hue changes (the same reasoning as used by the PAL TV standard to improve on NTSC). The improvement is particularly visible in dark brown or redish areas. Stefan Eckart, stefan@lis.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.2 | WINDOWS ---------------- The MPEG-Player 'MPEGXING.LZH' from Xing Technologies. [ Good player ! Works for nearly every card under 640x480x256 ] [ Works with ET-4000 under 1024x768x256 (with small fonts) too. ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Genoa product presentation MPEG demo. Its available via Ingenieurbuero Gatz & Hartmann, This is what you need to play it: A fast 486 ( at least 33 Mhz) with 16 MBytes of RAM. Also it is a ET4000 board required. Local-Bus is also okay... [ Also you need about 20MB free disk space. 10 for the file ] [ and 10 for the SMARTDRV-Cache. Didn't try it on the PC, ] [ but on the Sun's. It's a animated product info, not a ] [ movie; not worth to bother !! ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- MPEGPLAY V1.0 (c) 1993 Michael Simmons [ Hup ! Anotherone, that thinks, he's alone ... I proclaim, that this ] [ player should be called MPEGW32 from now on !!! ] This is Release Version 1.0 of an MPEG player for WIN32(tm) and WIN32s(tm). This player can play standard mpeg files that include P and B frame encoding, and large 354x288 movie files. It has several display options including mono,gray scale,color dither and Full color (for Hicolor graphic cards). To install the player under Windows 3.1(tm), Unzip the file disk1.zip to a floppy disk. Then, run the setup.exe file from Windows. To install the player under Windows NT(tm) copy the files mpegplay.exe and mpegplay.hlp to a common directory. Then, create a new program item for the mpegplay.exe file via the File New option of the Program Manager. The working directory must be the same as the program path. Otherwise the Online help file will not be found (see known bugs section at the end of this document.) Read the Disclaimer in the online Help before loading any mpeg movie files. This program is SHAREWARE. To receive the latest version of the Player send $25 US and a list of suggestions and/or bugs to: Michael Simmons 34 Shillington Way THORNLIE WA 6108 AUSTRALIA DISTRIBUTION: This File must not be separated from the rest of this archive. Due to licensing conditions of the WIN32s(tm) System this archive can only be Redistributed in the following ways: (1) Archive site to End user. (2) Archive site to Archive site. The following means of redistribution are not permitted: (1) End user to End user. (2) End user to Archive site. Redistribution from Archive site to Archive site may only be performed by the operators of those sites. An Archive site is taken to be any large collection of software which is operated by a person or group of persons for the primary purpose of redistributing that software. An End user is taken to be the person or group of persons who use this software. Known Bugs: (1) Help file must be in the working directory when the player is started. (2) The Mono Dither is not working properly. (3) The 2x2 Color Dither has patches of incorrect color. (4) Sometimes the player fails to display Full Color 354x288 images after a previous movie has been Opened and then Closed. (5) The Player is slower than is possiable. (6) Bug/feature The Player runs slow when ever the mouse is moving. Windows NT, Win32s, Windows 3.1 are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This code was derived from the U.C. Berkeley MPEG Player (version 2.0) developed by L.A. Rowe, K. Patel, and B. Smith (Rowe@CS.Berkeley.EDU). That code included the following copyright: Copyright (c) 1992 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.3 | WINDOWS-NT ------------------- From: msimmons@ec.uwa.oz.au (Michael Simmons - mgmt_staff) Subject: MPEG PLAYER for NT/WIN32s uploaded to cica Date: 16 Mar 1993 02:49:03 GMT I have uploaded my port (alpha version) to Windows NT and Win32s of the berkeley Public Domain MPEG player to ftp.cica.indiana.edu It is in the /pub/pc/win3/uploads directory.File name mpegnt.zip Below is the contents of the mpegnt.txt file. This archive contains my port (alpha version) to Windows NT(tm) and Win32s of the berkeley Public Domain MPEG player. WARNING this is code is very buggy so use it at your own risk. Read all of this file before running the player. I suggest that you close any running applications before running this player. To run this program under Windows 3.1 you will need a copy the the Win32s runtime this can be found in the Spice4?.zip files in the /pub/pc/win3/nt directory on ftp.cica.indiana.edu. It is also include on the October 92 Win32 SDK CD-ROM. For Win32s+Window3.1 users I also suggest you restart windows and/or reboot your machine after running the player. This player can Play both Xing(tm) 160x120 MPEG movies and standard 320x240 encoded movies. Note at present only the 24bit full color ditherer is implemented. This means that dithering the image down to 256 or 16 colors is done via the Windows DIB's driver. For best results you need either a 24bit or 15bit (hicolor) graphics card. Using Hicolor mode gives much better images than the Xing(tm) Player. At present I am working on getting the other ditherers working. This player has been run on the following two machines: (1) OPTI 486DX33 with 8Mb,Trident 1MB Video card in 640x480x16 Mode,120MB Hard disk and running Windows NT(tm). (2) SMI 486DX33 with 8Mb,ATI 2MB ULTRA + in 800x600x65K Mode, 200MB Hard disk and runing Win32s and Windows 3.1. It may not run on a machine with only 4Mb. To install the player copy the files to your hard disk then create a new program item by selecting the Program Manager File/New menu item. There are two versions of the player included mpegplay.exe and mpegply2.exe. mpegply2 is the same as mpegplay.exe but attempt to completly hog the cpu. The machine will not respond to any input while it is playing movies. To Play a movie perform the following: (1) Start the player either from the NT command prompt or via the Program Manager. (2) Select the Open Menu item from the File Menu. (3) type "*.mpg" into the file name dialog box. (4) select the file you wish to play. (5) Select Play from the Movie Menu (6) The movie will now play. (7) if you are running the mpegplay.exe player you may select Stop from the Movie Menu and then Open another movie for playing. Note - The player will Exit when/if it gets to the end of the Movie. The "Actual Size" and "Stretch to Window" options in the Display Menu determine whether the movie images are displayed as actual size (centered in the middle of the windows client area) or scaled to fill the windows entire client area. The Player will also play as an Icon if Iconified. This player is very easy to cash. Some known Bugs are (1) image is horizontally flipped.(Hey at least its not upside down!). (2) Player will cash if another movie is opened while the current movie is playing. (3) Stretch to window and Iconic play back modes are not functioning under win32s. (4) The common dialog box file selection filters are not working. (5) Fails to free memory after exit. The next release of this player should be much more stable. Please send suggestions and comments to msimmons@ecel.uwa.edu.au Windows NT(tm) is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Xing(tm) is a trademark of Xing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.4 | OS/2 ------------- From: hatton@socrates.ucsf.edu (Tom Hatton) Subject: Re: OS/2 MPEG player??? Date: 19 Apr 93 20:14:46 GMT There appears to be an OS/2 MPEG player; haven't used it, but the hobbes (ftp-os2.nmsu.edu) listing shows the following: mpegplay.zip 97028 Full-screen 320x200 MPEG animation player in pub/os2/2.x/graphics. [ Would be nice, if somebody could test this, and post some results. ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.5 | X-WINDOWS and Unix --------------------------- The Berkeley Plateau Research Group is happy to announce the release of Version 2.0 of its software-only MPEG decoder. The player is available via anonymous ftp from toe.cs.berkeley.edu (128.32.149.117) in /pub/multimedia/mpeg/mpeg_play-2.0.tar.Z. You'll find many sample MPEG streams in the subdirectory movies. Changes from v1.2 include: o Fixed green artifact bug. o Fixed sequence end code bug. o Many bug fixes. o Performance tweaks. MPEG Video Software Decoder (Version 2.0; Jan 27, 1993) Lawrence A. Rowe, Ketan Patel, and Brian Smith Computer Science Division-EECS, Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley This directory contains a public domain MPEG video software decoder. The decoder is implemented as a library that will take a video stream and display it in an X window on an 8, 24 or 32 bit deep display. The main routine is supplied to demonstrate the use of the decoder library. Several dithering algorithms are supplied based on the Floyd-Steinberg, ordered dither, and half-toning algorithms that tradeoff quality and performance. Neither the library nor the main routine handle real-time synchronization or audio streams. The decoder implements the standard described in the Committee Draft ISO/IEC CD 11172 dated December 6, 1991 which is sometimes refered to as "Paris Format." The code has been compiled and tested on the following platforms: HP PA-RISC (HP/UX 8.X, X11R4) (i.e., HP 9000/7XX and 9000/3XX) Sun Sparc (SunOS 4.X, X11R5) DECstation 5000 and Alpha IBM RS6000 Silicon Graphics Indigo MIPS RISC/os 4.51 Sequent Symmetry Sony NEWS and more than we can list here. If you decide to port the code to a new architecture, please let us know so that we can incorporate the changes into our sources. This directory contains everything required to build and display video. We have included source code, a makefile, an Imakefile, installation instructions, and a man page. Data files can be obtained from the same ftp site this was located in. See the INSTALL file for instructions on how to compile and run the decoder. The data files were produced by XING. XING data does not take advantage of P or B frames (ie, frames with motion compensation). Performance of the player on XING data is significantly slower (half or less) than the performance when motion compensated MPEG data is decoded. We are very interested in running the software on other MPEG streams. Please contact us if you have a stream that does not decode correctly. Also, please send us new streams produced by others that do utilize P and B frames. NOTE: One particular XING data file: raiders.mpg, is not a valid MPEG stream since it does not contain a sequence header. We have established several mailing lists for messages about the decoder: mpeg-list-dist@CS.Berkeley.EDU General information on the decoder for everyone interested should be sent to this list. This should become active after 11/20/92 mpeg-list-request@CS.Berkeley.EDU Requests to join or leave the list should be sent to this address. The subject line should contain the single word ADD or DELETE. mpeg-bugs@CS.Berkeley.EDU Problems, questions, or patches should be sent to this address. Our future plans include porting the decoder to run on other platforms, integrating it into a video playback system that supports real-time synchronization and audio streams, and further experiments to improve the performance of the decoder. Vendors or other organizations interested in supporting this research or discussing other aspects of this project should contact Larry Rowe at Rowe@CS.Berkeley.EDU. We also plan on producing an MPEG encoder. The encoder will NOT be a real time digitizer, but will be intended for offline processing of video data. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We gratefully thank Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, the Semiconductor Research Corporation for financial support. We also want to thank the following people for their help: Tom Lane of the Independent JPEG Group provided us with the basic inverse DCT code used by our player. (tom_lane@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu) Reid Judd of Sun Microsystems provided advice and assistance. Todd Brunhoff of NVR provided advise and assistance. Toshihiko Kawai of Sony provided advise and assistance. [ Brilliant !!! With a bit a power from a Sun or something like ] [ this, MPEG can be real fun. There is no real user-interface, ] [ but the quality is first class !! Very easy to compile !!! ] [ Version 1.2 is just relased. Now with Imakefile and lots of ] [ bug-fixes. Executable is much smaller. Still gets some colors ] [ wrong (with some movies). ] [ Version 2.0 is release and fixes this color- and other bugs. ] [ Running as well on : [ PC 386/486 ISC 2.2.1/3.0, SCO, 386BSD X11R3/R4/R5 ] [ NeXT NeXTStep NeXT Window, X11R5 ] [ Mac's AUX (with gcc1.37) X11-lib ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Brand new. The codec ! Meaning a Public-Domain-Encoder-Kit for Unix ! ] From: msimmons@ecel.uwa.edu.au (Michael Simmons - mgmt_staff) Subject: Standford MPEG codec Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1993 16:07:18 +0800 (WST) MPEG, CCITT H.261 (P*64), JPEG Image and Image sequence compression/decompression C software engines. The Portable Video Research Group at Stanford have developed image/image sequence compression and decompression engines (codecs) for MPEG, CCITT H.261, and JPEG. The primary goal of these codecs is to provide the functionality - these codecs are not optimized for speed, rather completeness, and some of the code is kludgey. Development of MPEG, P64, and JPEG engines is not the primary goal of the Portable Video Research Group. Our research is focused on software and hardware for portable wireless digital video communication. For more information about current research, please send e-mail to Professor Teresa Meng at meng@tilden.stanford.edu. COMMENTS/DISCLAIMERS: This code has been compiled on the Sun Sparc and DECstation UNIX machines; some code has been further checked on the HP workstations. For comments, bugs, and other mail relating to the source code, we appreciate any comments. The code author can be reached at Andy C. Hung at achung@cs.stanford.edu. The standard public domain disclaimer applies: Caveat Emptor - no guarantee on accuracy or software support. References related to these codecs should NOT use any author's name, or refer to Stanford University. Rather the Portable Video Research Group or the acronym (PVRG) should be used, such as PVRG-MPEG, PVRG-P64, PVRG-JPEG. CODEC DESCRIPTION: I) PVRG-MPEG CODEC: (havefun.stanford.edu:pub/mpeg/MPEGv1.0.tar.Z) This public domain video encoder and decoder was generated according to the Santa Clara August 1991 format. It has been tested successfully with decoders using the Paris December 1991 format. The codec is capable of encoding all MPEG types of frames. The algorithms for rate control, buffer-constrained encoding, and quantization decisions are similar, but not identical, to that of the (simulation model 1-3) MPEG document. The rate control used is a simple proportional Q-stepsize/Buffer loop that works though not very well - better rate-control is the essence for good quality buffer-constrained MPEG encoding. Verification of the buffering is possible so as to provide streams for real-time decoders. The MPEG codec performs compression and decompression on raw raster scanned YUV files. The companion display program for the X window system is described in section IV) below. A manual of approximately 50 pages describes the program's use. There are also MPEG compressed files from the table tennis sequence in tennis.mpg and the flower garden sequence in flowg.mpg. This codec was recently tested with the MPEG decoder of the Berkeley Plateau Research group. If what you want is decoding and X display, then you might want to look into their faster public domain MPEG decoder/viewer. The Berkeley player is available via anonymous ftp from toe.cs.berkeley.edu (128.32.149.117) in /pub/multimedia/mpeg/mpeg-1.2.tar.Z. II) PVRG-P64 CODEC: (havefun.stanford.edu:pub/p64/P64v1.0.tar.Z) This public domain video encoder and decoder is based on the CCITT H.261 specification. Some encoding algorithms are based on the RM 8 encoder. The codec has been tested against itself, though we were unable to test it against the INRIA encoder because apparently INRIA also interleaves/packetizes the audio and video. We would appreciate anyone having p64 video test sequences to let know. Like the MPEG codec, it supports all the encoding and decoding modes, and has provisions for buffer-constrained encoding, so it can produce streams for real-time decoders. The H.261 codec takes the similar YUV raster scanned files as the MPEG codec, and performs compression and decompresion on raster scanned YUV files. It can take standard CIF or NTSC-CIF files. The display of these programs is described in section IV) below. A manual of approximately 50 pages describes its use. There are also P64 compressed files from the table tennis sequence in table.p64 and the flower garden sequence in flowg.p64. III) PVRG-JPEG CODEC: (havefun.stanford.edu:pub/jpeg/JPEGv1.0.tar.Z) This public domain image encoder and decoder is based on the JPEG Committee Draft. It supports all of the baseline for encoding and decoding. The JPEG encoder is flexible in the variety of output possible. It also supports lossless coding, though not as speedy as we would like. The manual is approximately 50 pages long which describes its use. The display program for JFIF-style (YUV) files is described in section IV) below. The JFIF style is not a requirement for this codec - it can compress and decompress CMYK, RGB, RGBalpha, and other formats - this codec may be helpful if you wish to extract information from non-JFIF encoded JPEG files. This codec has been tested on publicly available JPEG data. For general purpose X display, you might want to try the program "xv" (version 2.0 or greater). The JPEG engine of the program "xv" is based on the free, portable C code for JPEG compression available from the Independent JPEG Group. (anonymous login - ftp.uu.net (137.39.1.9 or 192.48.96.9) /graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v4.tar.Z). IV) X VIEWER: (anonymous login- havefun.stanford.edu:pub/cv/CVv1.0.tar.Z) This viewer allows the user to look at image or image sequences generated through the codecs described above. These image or image sequences are in the YUV colorspace and may be 4:1:1 (CIF style) or 2:1:1 (CCIR-601 style) or 1:1:1 (non-decimated style). A short manual of approximately 2 pages describes its use. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I am especially grateful to Hewlett Packard and Storm Technology for their financial support during the earlier stages of codec development. Any errors in the code and documentation are my own. The following people are acknowledged for their advice and assistance. Thanks, one and all. The Portable Video Research Group at Stanford: Teresa Meng, Peter Black, Ben Gordon, Sheila Hemami, Wee-Chiew Tan, Eli Tsern. Adriaan Ligtenberg of Storm Technology. Jeanne Wiseman, Andrew Fitzhugh, Gregory Yovanof of Hewlett Packard. Eric Hamilton and Jean-Georges Fritsch of C-Cube Microsystems. Lawrence Rowe of the Berkeley Plateau Research Group. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.6 | MAC ------------ From: menes@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Rainer Menes) Subject: MPEG player for the Mac!!! Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 15:58:53 GMT Dear mac users, To bring the romuors to an end. To day I announce the MPEG player for the Mac. The distribution is based on the X-Window player 2.0 from Berkley. From a mac users view I would rate the program not to be a real mac application, but it does its duty. The packeged includes two application one to view MPEGs on a Mac in a window, and another to convert MPEGs to PICTs. These PICTs can be use to convert a MPEG film to a quicktime film. This way isn't a hit but it works. On a Quadra 700 you get up to 5 frames a sec for some MPEG films. So don't be dispointed when your old MacII only gets 1 frame/ sec. or so. MPEG is quit heavy stuff for realtime MPEG I have seen that you need around 1 Gops (Giga Operations per Sec.) to decode and 4-5 Gops for encoding. This shows you why MPEG algorithm in software is so slow. One remark for PC users the XING mpeg player for Windos isn't a real mpeg player, it has a lot of limitations which the MPEG player for the didn't have, and this makes this thing alot faster. The Mac player should be able to view any standard MPEG file, even that one produced by the sortly available hardware from c-cube. Now I have talk a lot, here is the ftp site you will find my MPEG player. ftp suniams1.statistik.tu-muenchen.de (131.159.64.1) login: anonymous password: your mailaddress cd /pub/mac filename: mpeg_mac_0.15.sit.hqx (BinHex4.0 format and Stuffit 1.51 format) and alot of example files. If you have the old version of MPEG player for the Mac 0.1 try to get the new one 0.15. This version should be compatible also to Macs without FPU, but a 68020 or up is requered. (MacII, MacIIcx, MacIIx, MacIIci, MacIIsi, SE-30, MacIIfx, Clasic II, LC I II III, Quadra 700, 800, 900, 950, Centris 610 and 650 with or without FPU, Color Clasic, and Power Books 145,160,165, 170,180). You should be able to use the player and converter on any screen from 538x384 to 1180x890 and form 1-Bit to 32-Bit per pixel. To avoid problems please read the Readme file which is include in the sit file. This file gives you some tips to work around some pitfalls with my player. Now have fun with the software, Rainer email: menes@statistik.tu-muenchen.de P.S: If you have problems please mail me, but sometimes it may take some time to get help, because today we got a big project and I will have very little time. [ See his other mail in the section Chapter VIII | RETRIEVED MAIL too. ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.7 | ATARI -------------- From 72241.405@compuserve.com Tue Apr 13 17:56:15 1993 Date: 13 Apr 93 10:40:34 EDT From: Brainstorm <72241.405@compuserve.com> Bonjour!, For technical points about our MPEG decoder: It's a SOFTWARE ONLY decoder, currently running on any ATARI FALCON computers (not on the TT, because it uses the MOTOROLA DSP56001). Video output modes: - B/W, using a 4x4 bayer dithering matrix. - 4 greyscales, using a 4x4 bayer dithering matrix. - 16 greyscales, using a 2x2 bayer dithering matrix. - ATARI 15 bits true color (no dithering). We have to write the 256 colors and the 24 bits true color modes. Decoder's MPEG compatibility: It currently only handles I Frames. We have found some MPEG files with P and B frames, so it shouldn't a problem to implement P and B decompression. We don't handle MPEG sound, because it's currently impossible to find MPEG files with MPEG sound. The only card which seems to encode MPEG sound is from Optibase, and I ask them to give us a MPEG file with sound, but there were not very 'interested' in helping us... Decoder speed: It depends a lot of the MPEG file and display mode. Here are some benchmark with 4 known MPEG files: File Size (Bytes) Time (Frames/Sec) Video Mode F16.MPG 94959 12.15 320x200, 4 Col. (TV) F16.MPG 11.25 320x200, 16 Col. (TV) F16.MPG 9.10 320x200, T.C. (TV) MJACKSON.MPG 724567 13.82 320x200, 4 Col. (TV) MJACKSON.MPG 13.19 320x200, 16 Col. (TV) MJACKSON.MPG 10.40 320x200, T.C. (TV) ROM.MPG 250937 9.25 320x200, 4 Col. (TV) ROM.MPG 8.81 320x200, 16 Col. (TV) ROM.MPG 8.02 320x200, T.C. (TV) TAHITI.MPG 303547 11.87 320x200, 4 Col. (TV) TAHITI.MPG 11.28 320x200, 16 Col. (TV) TAHITI.MPG 9.45 320x200, T.C. (TV) Decoder Size: Currently, it's about 22Kb. P and B frames management shouldn't take more than 10Kb. Next Changes: 1: Speed: We expect to be 2 Frames/Sec faster in true color mode, and 1 Frame/Sec faster in other modes. 2: P and B frames compatibility. Decoder's Availability: Brainstorm is a small company, dedicated in writing software. We don't want to sell the MPEG decoder by ourself. That's why we are currently looking for a company interested in buying and distributing it. So, I can't tell you when it will be available, and what will be it's price. Brainstorm: 19 bis, rue de Cotte 75012 Paris FRANCE tel +(331) 44670809 fax +(331) 44670811 We can be reached at: - 72241.405@COMPUSERVE.COM or, maybe, - laurent.chemla@f200.n320.z2.fidonet.com ??? (we didn't test it) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From 72241.405@compuserve.com Fri Apr 30 16:08:25 1993 Date: 29 Apr 93 10:50:06 EDT From: Brainstorm <72241.405@compuserve.com> Brainstorm MPEG changes: Things are moving a lot! Last days, we have been working on speed improvements on our MPEG decoder. Here are the new benchmarks: File Size (Bytes) Av. Time (Frames/Sec) Video Mode BIRDISBA.MPG 502473 15.24 320x200, 4 Col. (TV) BIRDISBA.MPG 14.75 320x200, 16 Col. (TV) BIRDISBA.MPG 11.51 320x200, T.C. (TV) [ stuff deleted ] The decoder is now 32 Kb. As you can see, the speed depends a lot of the screen resolution. There are two main reasons: 1 - The Falcon video chip is connected to the MC68030 bus. It means that the video ram can be everywhere on the falcon RAM (on a PC, the video ram is on the video card). So, if you are using your computer on a nice video mode (i.e. true color), a lot of bus bandwidth is used by the video chip, and the 68030 is slower. 2 - In true color mode, the MPEG movie is displayed in color, and we perform 6 8x8 DCTs, and the colorspace conversion. In greyscale mode, we only perform 4 8x8 DCTs, and there is no colorspace conversion (we use the Y channel). One of our biggest problem in this decoder is that the Falcon is a '2 chips' computer: the MC68030 at 16 MHz, and the DSP56001 at 32 MHz. We are using both chips (the MC68030 for the Huffman decoder, the DSP56001 for everything else). The speed of the decoder is the speed of the slowest chip. Till last week, the slowest was the MC68030, but we have improved a lot the Huffman decoder. So, the bottleneck is now the DSP56001. Our next big job is the DSP code improvement. Best regards, Raphael (Brainstorm) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.7 | DATA ------------- Several data-files (.mpg) are known. See the list below: ---- Utilities (Players): ---- MPEGDOS.ZIP 22183 11-16-92 MPEGWIN.ZIP 462053 1-18-93 MPEG-2.0.TAR.F 99921 2-15-93 MPEG286 ZIP 115831 2-18-93 MPEG386 ZIP 114109 2-18-93 MPEGPLAY ZIP 97351 3-20-93 [ that's known as PLAYMPEG.ZIP too ! ] MPEGNT ZIP 140428 3-17-93 [ These are files from the Stanford-codec's ] CHANGES 1737 20-03-93 CVv1.1.tar.z 47849 20-03-93 JPEGv1.1.tar.z 172657 20-03-93 MPEGv1.1.tar.z 250732 20-03-93 P64v1.1.tar.z 202249 20-03-93 -------- MPEG-MOVIES --------- 2JAEGER MPG 70015 3-21-93 10:03a 2JETS MPG 416159 11-23-92 2:08p BIRDISBA MPG 502473 7-23-92 1:36a BIRDSHOW MPG 180963 6-04-92 1:01a BIRDWALK MPG 206417 6-04-92 12:48a EGGCLOCK MPG 157341 11-15-92 6:36p F16 MPG 94959 6-04-92 1:28a FIMPSY MPG 281960 3-20-93 11:21a FIMPSY50 MPG 240029 3-20-93 11:21a FIREFING MPG 37700 4-23-93 1:53p FLIGHT MPG 24 11-21-92 12:37p FRISCO MPG 84552 1-07-93 6:31p HULAHOOP MPG 114148 1-18-93 7:54p IICM MPG 1679360 2-24-93 3:15p JETS MPG 479434 3-20-93 11:21a JOEL MPG 285388 3-20-93 11:21a MICKY MPG 53411 3-20-93 11:22a MJ MPG 619275 2-11-93 2:07a MJACKSON MPG 784741 2-05-93 2:54p MODEL1 MPG 678804 3-20-93 11:22a MOGLIE MPG 292665 6-25-92 6:28p MONKEY MPG 169142 4-21-93 5:22p MOONFLAG MPG 118218 4-21-93 5:23p MOONFLY MPG 109622 4-21-93 5:25p MPGGENOA MPG 8241296 11-08-92 10:24p QUME MPG 364256 3-20-93 11:22a RAIDERS MPG 978660 12-21-92 2:33p ROCKET MPG 104987 4-21-93 5:25p ROM MPG 250937 11-24-92 10:13a SUKHOI MPG 140288 3-20-93 11:23a TEST10 MPG 32176 2-18-93 1:59p TEST2 MPG 102188 2-18-93 1:59p TEST30 MPG 14098 2-18-93 1:59p TEST4 MPG 63550 2-18-93 1:59p TEST6 MPG 47399 2-18-93 1:59p TEST8 MPG 37823 2-18-93 1:59p TOASTER MPG 78093 4-21-93 5:25p XTITLE MPG 2738 11-15-92 6:36p ------ XING-AUDIO-FILES ------- 2JAEGER WAV 51244 9-03-92 6:27p 2JETS WAV 59580 11-23-92 2:08p BIRDISBA WAV 145452 9-03-92 6:30p BIRDWALK WAV 49196 9-03-92 6:51p EGGCLOCK WAV 63572 8-25-92 9:58a JETS WAV 73772 9-03-92 6:03p MICKY WAV 20566 9-03-92 5:37p MJ WAV 286784 2-11-93 2:10a MODEL1 WAV 522290 2-11-93 12:27a MPGGENOA WAV 1520314 11-08-92 7:31p RAIDERS WAV 1301458 3-25-93 5:30p ------ BIG-MPEG-MOVIES ------- BICYCLE MPG 718897 3-19-93 2:02p BIKE MPG 642590 3-20-93 12:38p BUS MPG 718464 3-19-93 2:02p CANYON MPG 1744060 3-19-93 12:54p CT MPG 119040 4-21-93 5:26p FLOWERS MPG 690185 3-20-93 12:38p HULA_2 MPG 148076 2-15-93 1:28p MOBILE MPG 573440 3-17-93 3:29p SHORT MPG 83522 3-24-93 8:30p TENNIS MPG 1246001 3-20-93 11:08a WATERSKI MPG 417792 3-20-93 11:11a [ These BIG mpeg-movies are ONLY playable with the berkeley-decoder ! ] [ Xing does not support this format so far. ] ---- MPEG-DOCUMENTS ---- IMAGE-PS F 725803 1-14-93 ( ) [ overview about image-processing ] MM93-PS.F 242555 11-01-93 ( ) [ overview about MPEG decoding ] MPEGSRC.ZIP 92780 1-14-93 ( ) [ the source for MPEG128.EXE ] MPLAY-PS.F 205580 1-12-93 ( ) [ overview about a Media Player ] [ These are files from the Stanford-codec's. They include several ] [ Postscript-Pictures (describing the encoding process). The real ] [ documents are included in the src-archives of the codec's. ] JPEGDOCv1.1.tar.z 49873 20-03-93 MPEGDOCv1.1.tar.z 47645 20-03-93 P64DOCv1.1.tar.z 47497 20-03-93 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- III.8.1 | INFOS about Movies ----------------------------- The movie SAMPLE.MPG is now know as EGGCLOCK.MPG (surely the .WAV changed too). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- IICM.MPG was produced at the Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media (IICM) of the Graz University of Technology. It features a fly-by through (parts of) the Mandelbrot set through a terrain model of the surroundings of Graz with a corresponding satellite image used as texture map, and the 'Uhrturm' (clocktower), which is the landmark of Graz and the logo of the institute. Kein Wunder! It was produced using Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer on Silicon Graphics 4D/35 and converted to MPEG using Xing's encoder software for Personal Computers. Distribute freely! Frank M. Kappe fkappe@iicm.tu-graz.ac.at Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media (IICM) Graz University of Technology, Austria Voice: ++43/316/832551-22 Fax: ++43/316/824394 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: harti@mikro.ee.tu-berlin.de (Stefan Hartmann (Behse)) Subject: MPEG CD-ROM, how to submit animations. Date: 13 Feb 1993 13:07:16 GMT Hi, well I'm looking for animations "freaks" who want to see their work published on a CD-Rom. We will put together a CD-Rom with many MPEG animations and hope to find some people who will donate their FLI or FLIC animations to convert to MPEG animation format. We will do the conversion, so you just have to donate your FLI or FLC file. What will it bring to you, if you donate your animation ? 1. You will be included with your full adress in the doc files, so companies could contact you, if they wish to have some new art from you. 2. This CD-Rom will sell worldwide, so you might get known a little bit more than now... 3. You will receive 5 free copies of this CD-Rom, so you can sell it to your friends and earn some money from it. 4.The CD-Rom price will be not higher than about 39 US$, so you will get about 195 US$ for your work. You can get additional copies of this CD-Rom for to sell it to more friends at a very low price. 5. You will receive no royalities from this CD-Rom, but it sells at this low price which just covers the work for producing and distributing this disc worldwide. 6. Don't miss your chance to be included on the world's first MPEG CD-ROM with your best animation. 7. The best animation will win a prize ! So I hope this will convince you to contact me and that you would like to include your animation on our CD-Rom. If you still have any questions, please send me email. Best regards, Stefan Hartmann, c/o Gatz & Hartmann email to: leo@zelator.in-berlin.de Questions and answers: ====================== I have 24-bit stills that create an animation. I do not know how to create MPEG animations. The format is 24-bit Amiga IFF. Can we do business? Yes we can ! Just convert your single pictures via e.g. Art Department to JPEG pics and tell me on what FTP server you might put them up, so that I can get them from there. JPEG is preferred, cause it does not consume much space. What kind of format is this animation in now ? Is it FLI or FLC ? We have the possibility to convert FLI or FLC to MPEG. Also if you only have single pics, we can convert them to MPEG too. In this moment MPEG encoding runs via single TGA pics, so we have to convert your animation back to single TARGA pics and then convert them to MPEG via the Xing encoder. So I hope this will convince you to contact me and that you would like to include your animation on our CD-Rom. If you still have any questions, please send me email. What kind of animations would make a chance? Any just-playing-around-in-my- animations-software kind of animations or do they have to be state-of-the-art animations looking like professionals have produced it. Do they have to have a specific length (e.g. >30 frames) ?? No, we just take any animation which is not just a few flying dots on the screen... We prefer funny animations, but also like technical demonstrations or any raytracing art or simular animations done with Animator or 3DStudio. It has not to be state of the art ! We just want to have a Demo CD-Rom which shows what can be done with MPEG. When are you planning to release the cd (how much time is left). We plan to release this CD-Rom at May of this year 93 so your work should be finaly done soon, latest submission will be around 15th of April 93. Best regards, Stefan Hartmann, c/o Gatz & Hartmann email to: leo@zelator.in-berlin.de =========================================================================== IV | MPEG-RELATED HARDWARE =========================== The following is excerpted from: VIDEO COMPRESSION OPTIONS, IEEE CICC 6-May-92 by John J. Bloomer, jbloomer@crd.ge.com, Fathy F. Yassa, Aiman A. Abdel-Malek [The following telephone-numbers surely are US-numbers] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV.1 | Pipelined Processors, Building Blocks (Chip Sets) --------------------------------------------------------- STI3220 = SGS-Thompson motion estimator (H.261, MPEG). 602-867-6279 - 8-bit input pixels, 4-bit H and V vectors out - adjustable block size matcher (8x8, 8x16, 16x16) - +7/-8 search window - 5V, 2W at 18MHz (max), 68 pin PLCC L647*0 and L6471* = LSI Logic H.621/MPEG pieces. 408-433-8000 - L64720 motion estimator, 30/40MHz, 8x8, 16x16 blocks, 32x32 or 16x16 TMC2311 = TRW CMOS Fast Cosine Transform Processor. - 12 Bits, 15 M pixels/s - complies with the CCITT SGXV (e.g. JPEG, H.261 and MPEG) - includes an adder-subtractor for linear predictive coding HGCT = Ricoh CRC, Generalized Chen Transform demonstration chip. 408-432-8800. - 2D JPEG/MPEG/H.261 compatible DCT - includes quantization - 30MHz, 15K gates - licensing possible Vision Proc. = Integrated Information Technology Inc. 408-727-1885 - generic DCT, motion compensated & entropy coding codec - microcode for still- and motion-video compression (JPEG, H.261 and MPEG1) - 1 micron CMOS, 20 MHz and 33 MHz, PGA and 84-pin QFP - JPEG only and JPEG/H/261/MPEG versions available, H.261 at 30 f/s. - used by Compression Labs, Inc. CDV teleconferencing system - rumored to be the heart of the AT&T picture phone AVP1000 = AT&T JPEG, MPEG and H.261 codec chipset. 800-372-2447 - 1400D decoder, 1400C system controller - 1300E H.261 (CIF, QCIF, CIF240) at 30 f/s, I-frame only MPEG. - 1400E is superset of 1300E, motion with 1/2 pixel resolution over +/- 32 pixels - YCbCr video or digital input, on-board rate FIFOs, external RAM required - 0.75 micron, 50 MHz CMOS 82750PB, 82750DB = Intel DVI pixel and display YUV color space processors. - proprietary machine code employed for compression - usable for other algorithms (e.g., JPEG, H.261 or MPEG1 at reduced data rates) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV.2 | Pipelined Processors, Monolithic, Fixed Lossy ----------------------------------------------------- CL950 = C-Cube/JVC implementation of the MPEG-JVC or extended mode MPEG-I announced. 6-9 Mb/sec. CL450 = Announced June 1992. Scaled down version of CL950, with 3Mb/sec limit. Only MPEG-I decoding. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV.3 | Codecs Chips Under Development -------------------------------------- MPEG1 codec chips due from - TI, Brooktree, Cypress Semiconductor, Motorola (successor to the DSP96002 Multimedia Engine), Xing Technology/Analog Devices, Sony and C-Cube Windbond Electronics Corp. is developing a DSP chip for CD-I, MPEG and JPEG ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IV.4 | DSP Chip Based JPEG/MPEG Solutions ------------------------------------------ Spirit-40 = Sonitech International Inc. ISA card. 617-235-6824 - two TMS320C40 DSPs for 80 MFLOPS - connect 16 boards in a hypercube for up to 1280 MFLOPS - JPEG, MPEG-1 audio and other voice coding applications HardPak = CERAM Inc., ISA and EISA file compression board. 719-540-8500 - 3.4 x 1.8 inch footprint (notebook, laptops) - 32KB on-board write-thru file compression cache - CERAM also has an SBus compressive swap-space accelerator for Suns macDSP = Spectral Innovations, AT&T DSPC32-based accelerator. 408-727-1314 - JPEG functions available - 30 MFLOPS on the NuBus =========================================================================== V.1 | MAILBOX-ACCESS ===================== This is the phone number of Xing Technologies' BBS: 805-473-2680 (2400b) (USA) Bryan Woodworth wrote: Would you also please add, that the Xing BBS now supports v.32bis and HST ! I am not sure on HST, but I am sure it supports v.32bis. However, I have a v.32bis modem, and could only connect at 9600. I think they do not have the modem configured properly. [ Well, Xing's software is dominating the MPEG-market, so what's about a ] [ Internet-Connection ? ] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- V.2 | ------ These are the phone numbers of Gatz & Hartmann's 7 line support BBS: ++49 30- 462 63 41 (v32bis) ++49 30- 462 64 35 (v32bis) ++49 30- 462 65 38 (v32bis) ++49 30- 462 60 22 (v32 + PEP) ++49 30- 462 61 37 (v32) ++49 30- 462 62 37 (v32) ++49 30- 461 86 50 (v22bis + HST) This is the professional Zelator-ACCESS-BBS system with Internet access. There will be several new MPEG clips and updates of the GENOA 7900 SVGA board drivers, 24 bit ET4000 programing infos,etc... Check it out ! You will enjoy it. Just log in with: guh That means: Gatz und Hartmann. =========================================================================== VI.1 | FTP-ACCESS (PD) ======================== There is an MPEG archive site at: phoenix.oulu.fi (130.231.240.17) in the directory /pub/mpeg Here is the current list from /pub/mpeg: -rw-r--r-- 471502 Sep 13 17:36 MPEGXING.LZH -rw-r--r-- 1192 Oct 2 21:48 TUTTIF3D.DOC -rw-r--r-- 502473 Jul 23 21:53 birdisba.mpg -rw-r--r-- 696 Jul 23 22:25 birdisba.txt -rw-r--r-- 233981 Jul 7 1992 joel.lzh -rw-r--r-- 1137 Jul 7 1992 joel.txt -rw-r--r-- 34283 Jul 7 1992 lha.exe -rw-r--r-- 278 Jul 7 1992 lha.txt -rw-r--r-- 292665 Jun 25 1992 moglie.mpg -rw-r--r-- 439 Jun 25 1992 moglie.txt -rw-r--r-- 244095 Sep 18 12:42 mpegplay-020792.lha -rw-r--r-- 368955 Sep 23 00:30 mpegplay.zoo -rw-r--r-- 721801 Jun 3 1992 mpgmovie.lzh -rw-r--r-- 368 Jun 3 1992 mpgmovie.txt -rw-r--r-- 978660 Sep 13 17:35 raiders.mpg -rw-r--r-- 250937 Jul 4 1992 rom.mpg -rw-r--r-- 951 Jul 4 1992 rom.txt -rw-r--r-- 534405 Jul 3 1992 sukhoi.mpg -rw-r--r-- 342 Jul 3 1992 sukhoi.txt -rw-r--r-- 414427 Oct 2 21:45 tuttif3d.lzh Please contact this ftp-site for files before e-mailing to me !!! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI.3 | ------- There is an MPEG archive site at: toe.cs.berkeley.edu (128.32.149.117) in the directory /pub/multimedia/mpeg --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI.3 | ------- Gatz & Hartman BBS is now reachable via ftp, between 18.00 - 6.00 german time. Login as 'gast', then look for IBM-Files under File-Sector 14 : IBM_g_und_h zelator.in-berlin.de (192.109.42.11) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI.4 | ------- Bryan Woodworth invites you to the ftp-server: ftp.rahul.net (192.160.13.1) in /pub/bryanw/pc/animation/mpeg Login as "anonymous," any time of the day or night. [ Several MPEG-Information is located in the directory /pub/bryanw ] [ Bryan was the first one, that downloaded the brand new mpeg-player ] [ from Xing's BBS and posted it to a.b.p.u, thnx to Bryan ! ] He wrote: If the people have problems connecting, they should send a capture of the session to "support@rahul.net," so that the problem can be corrected. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- VI.5 | ------- Good ftp-hosts to look for MPEG-related software are: ftp.cica.indiana.edu (129.79.20.84) ftp.germany.eu.net (192.76.144.75) ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de (130.149.17.7) mucket.vast.unsw.edu.au nic.funet.fi (128.214.6.100) pinus.slu.se (130.238.98.11) wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.135.4) =========================================================================== VII | MAIL-ORDER ================== GET THE "TRAIL-PACK" !!! ========================== You can purchase a complete archive named the "Trail-Pack" including the FAQ and all named programs, source-code, movies and information-files. This archive includes (in addition to the ftp-access) all versions of the programs and source-code, additional movies (including the audio-wav-files) and lots of additional informations. It will contain at least 4,094,228 AUDIO 6,983,207 BIGMOVIE 836,301 CODEC 913,193 DEMO 1,501,498 DOC 270,728 FAQ 17,498,558 MOVIES 1,430,828 UTIL ====================== Total = > 33 MB compressed = > 50 MB uncompressed MPEG ! To obtain the "Trail-Pack" send a envelope, with the big-written key-word "Trail-Pack" on it to: PHADE SOFTWARE Inh. Frank Gadegast Leibnizstr. 30 1000 Berlin 12 G E R M A N Y and include in it: o 30 DM (thirty German Mark), to pay the time I spend on copying disks and going to the post (money, that will be over, will be used to prepare the next version of this FAQ). Please do NOT included ANY coins. o 25 HD-floppy-disk (3-1/2" or 5-1/2"), allready formatted (MSDOS). If this FAQ is older than about 3 month (please look at the date at the top) included a few MORE floppy-disk, because the archive is growing day by day. o a hard-cover-envelope (big and strong enough to carry the 25 floppy- disks, written with YOUR correct adress. o enough money (at least 15 DM from other countries, 10 DM from inside Germany) to pay the postage of the "Trail-Pack" (the postage of your package to me, should be nearly the same, compared to, what I have to spend, to send the "Trail-Pack"; so, if you are living in Australia, send MORE money; the last package back to Taiwan cost about DM 24 !). Again, please do NOT include ANY coins. Try to send me a ENVELOPE, not a packet. It should go through the letter box. NOTE: There is no guarantee, how, and when you will get the "Trail-Pack" back. I'll do my best to prepare the packages as quick as possible. But I can't guarantee for the post ;o) NOTE: Please do not send any schecks, or try to pay via credit-cards. NOTE: Requests, that are NOT complete will be send back, using the included money. Is no money included, nothing will be send back and my archive will thank you for your floppy-disk-gift !!! Is there no money neither floppy-disks, your envelope will go to the bin. NOTE: This is NOT a commercial offer, it's a service for those, that don't have internet-access !!! =========================================================================== VIII | RETRIEVED MAIL ======================= From: kpatel@roger-rabbit.cs.berkeley.edu (KETAN DASHARATH PATEL) Subject: Re: Xing's SW, Really MPEG Compression? Date: Thu Nov 19 13:20:35 1992 Unfortunately, it is true. XING data is NOT true MPEG and in fact does a lot of dubious things with its Inverse DCT. XING data is simply a sequence of I-Frames (i.e. no interframe compression is done, no motion vectors, nothing). This amounts to little more than a sequence of JPEG type images. Ketan Patel kpatel@cs.berkeley.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Mark Adler Date: Mon, 30 Nov 92 11:36:19 -0800 Subject: Re: MPEG - FAQ There was a correction in the trade journal where I saw the MPEG II extension mentioned. They are now saying that, yes, they did agree to extend MPEG II's target bit rate to meet the needs of HDTV applications, but that there is no real upper limit to the MPEG II compressed rate, and that they expect no delays in the completion of the final spec, scheduled for March 1993. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those of you working on MPEG encoding might be interested in the accelerator board we have built for computing motion vectors and DCTs on Sun workstations. Following is a description. For ordering information, contact me at: Space Computer Corporation 2800 Olympic Blvd. Suite 104 Santa Monica, CA 90404 Telephone: (310)829-7733 FAX: (310)829-1694 Internet: spacecc@cerf.net Bill Kendall - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - VCA-1 VIDEO COMPRESSION ACCELERATOR FOR SUN WORKSTATIONS Special-Purpose Hardware for Motion Estimation and DCTs ------------------------------------------------------------------ FEATURES: Performs 8x8 DCTs in 21 microsec after first DCT at 52 microsec.* Performs 32x32 cross search for 16x16 block in 239 microsec.* Mounts in a single SBus slot. Included software allows user-transparent access. Price: $2,900 (subject to change without notice). *Stated times are for a 25-MHz SBus. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The VCA-1 Video Compression Accelerator is a one-slot SBus add-in board for Sun workstations which reduces the run time for MPEG encoding up to an order of magnitude. It is intended to aid both researchers and designers of MPEG-based digital video products. The VCA-1 accelerator can be utilized in any SBus-based workstation. The VCA-1 provides high-speed hardware execution of the two most computationally-intensive MPEG compression operations: motion estimation and discrete cosine transform (DCT) computation. These operations are performed by two special-purpose VLSI devices manufactured by LSI Logic Corporation. The first device is the L64720 Motion Estimation Processor, which contains 64 high-performance, special-purpose processors on a single chip. This device implements an exhaustive search algorithm in which a user-selectable data block in the current video frame is offset and compared with a window in a reference image. The device computes the position of the best match, the minimum error, and the zero-offset error. The error computed is the sum of absolute differences. The data block is user-selectable for either 16x16 or 8x8 pixels, and the size of the search window is adjustable by setting software parameters. The second device is the L64730 Discrete Cosine Transform Processor, which contains eight special-purpose processors. This device computes both the forward and inverse DCT over 8x8 blocks, delivering 12-bit output data for the forward transform and 8 or 9-bit output data for the inverse transform. It also can be used for loop filtering and inter-frame prediction subtraction. In addition to the above devices, the VCA-1 contains 3 MBytes of DRAM and three gate arrays. The VCA-1 is fully compliant with SBus standards, and requires only a single workstation slot. If all of the SBus slots are already filled, the VCA-1 can be installed in an inexpensive expansion box sold by Sun Microsystems. Software provided with the VCA-1 accelerator consists of routines which completely control the board's various functions. This software, which runs under Sun OS, can easily be integrated with existing MPEG encoding software to perform motion estimation and DCT/IDCT computations. Full source code is provided. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bryan Woodworth Subject: Re: MPEGFAQ.INFO -- Thanks, Frank. Date: Wed, 24 Feb 93 12:12:59 PST In other news, Xing is working hard on a DOS MPEG player with WAV file support. It should be out (it had better be..) within a year, most likely 3-4 months. It will work via VESA autodetect; I suspect it will use VESA's 640x480 mode. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: toddb@nvr.com (Todd Brunhoff) Subject: New product for MPEG, JPEG compression under UNIX and X Date: 16 Feb 93 01:08:43 GMT North Valley Research announced today immediate availability of a family of products for working with video and other time-based media in a UNIX environment. These products enable the end user to take video and audio all the way from video camera or tape to an MPEG sequence that can be played back in real-time on most Sun SPARCstations, without hardware assistance. For more info: - reply to me personally (don't post a followup) - get the announcement via anonymous ftp to nvr.com (192.82.231.50) in /pub/NVR - check comp.windows.x.announce, comp.newprod, comp.sys.sun.announce --------------- internet: toddb@nvr.com c--Q Q US: Todd Brunhoff; North Valley Research; ` 15262 NW Greenbriar Pkwy; Beaverton, OR 97006 - Phone: (503) 531-5707 Fax: (503) 690-2320 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: menes@statistik.tu-muenchen.de (Rainer Menes) Subject: MPEG for Mac Info Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1993 12:15:54 GMT Dear MPEG for the Mac users, Today I think more than 200-300 user are out there using the player. I am not getting any big response to my software. So I think it works ok. Does it realy ??? I must read in Comp.sys.mac.digest "the slow and buggy player". Slow is ok but buggy? Are there any bugs which I don't know? If there any besides it is slow or the file type is incorrect, or the mpeg file are altered during transfer to the Mac (lf->cr), then please mail me, and ftp the buggy mpeg file to suniams1.statistik.tu-muenchen.de (131.159.64.1) and put it in the dir /incoming/buggy_mpeg. Thanks!! I could only fix these problem when I know them. Now I have collected some tools which might be usefull for most of the users: 1. bunchtyper 1.01 an util which takes care of the TYPE and CREATOR of a file or a collections of files. This has shown to be the bigest problem at all with my mpeg player. 2. filetyper 3.2 the same as bunchtyper (take both and decide what do you like best). 3. picttomovie 1.0 converts the picts created by the converter to an quicktime movie. Some users have quicktime but not convert to movie. This utils should closes this gap. 4. qtbatchcompress1.0 a util to convert the picts to jpegs-pict with quicktime. This util might be usefull to reduce the storage use by tones of pict-files from a converted mpeg-movie. ( Trying differnt codecs or what ever). You will find the tools in the dir /pub/mac/utils on my ftp-site. (suniams1.statistik.tu-muenchen.de 131.159.64.1 or all other major archive sites have these tools too but not in the same dir you have to look for it) Now to the problem with the slowness of the software. I first got aware of that problem two days ago when I meet a friend of mine who has a MacII si. Some files are running only with 0.5 - 0.8 frames a second. Sorry I did't know. That the differnce between the quadra 700 and the si is up to 10 times in speed differnce I have become aware of, only two days ago. My Quadra plays the same movie with 5.3 - 7 frames a second. I don't what to know what frame rate a Clasic II or a LC may reach. Now how does the player compare to other computers running the same software (sourcecode is the Berkley MPEG-Player for X-Window): 486-33MHz 256KByte extern-cache with Linux 0.99.7 gcc 2.33 -O2 -m486 7.3 frames/sec. Quadra 700 0KByte extern-cache with System 7.1 gcc1.37r7 -O2 5.2 frames/sec. Sparc Station SLC ?? with sunos 4.2 gcc 2.33 -O2 6.7 frames/sec. SGI Iris Indigo R3000 with Unix 4.5 cc -O 15.0 frames/sec. all for the same movie flight.mpg but with differnt framebuffer depth. This may slightly infuence the results. The most interresting value is the differnce between the 486 and the 68040. First both processor have a very close architecture (cache, some RISC-features and so on). Even the efficents how many cycles per instruction is very close. If I remember correct the 68040 and 486 have 1.3 - 1.2 cycles per instruction in the mean. Now you see it would be very surprising if the 68040 25MHz is faster than a 33MHz 486 which has an external cache. The difference in frame rate is nearly simular to the difference in clock speed. Another point is the gcc compiler has made a drastic improfment between version 1.37 and 2.33 which was used on the 486 with Linux (a freeware Unix clone). There are no optimisation done for the 68040 at all but as you see the Linux version is optimised for the 486. I would expect to get 10- 20% speed improfment with gcc 2.33 for the 68040. Beside I made a new version which has been speeded up alittle 15-20% and the gcc 2.33 compiler should be out in a month or so. This makes me optimistic than my Quadra will play back a mpeg film as fast as a normal 486-33Mhz in the near future. The new version should be out next week. It will support any resolution of a MPEG-film. As said befor it is alittle faster and the converter will use the filename of the orginal mpeg film as name and not test.xxxx. Only small improfments but Rom wasn't build in a day. Hope you have fun with my player, and you report bugs to me Til next week, Rainer email: menes@statistik.tu-muenchen.de --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: bryanw@rahul.net (Bryan Woodworth) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 21:47:18 GMT In <1993Feb15.192224.777@prime.mdata.fi> marcus@mits.mdata.fi (Marcus Ahlfors) writes: >Wanted a MPG player for Amiga that fully works. Not the MPEG_Viewer packet >what needed some strager library that noone had.. A packet that fully works >thanks. I know nothing about Amiga (except they are very nice for multimedia) but someone uploaded some mpeg players to my site, you may want to try.. ftp.rahul.net, 192.160.13.1, /pub/bryanw/amiga/... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mlelstv@specklec.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Michael van Elst) Subject: Re: MPG Viewer for Amiga Wanted!! Date: 17 Feb 93 01:23:05 GMT I once uploaded a version mpeg_play1.2 to amiga.physik.unizh.ch under the name mp.lha. I just got mpeg_play2.0 working but don't want to upload until I've finished HAM support. If you can live with EHB-only please contact me. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mlelstv@specklec.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Michael van Elst) Subject: Re: MPG Viewer for Amiga Wanted!! Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 17:07:44 GMT If nothing goes wrong I'll upload my player (which supports Amiga EHB and HAM6 graphics) next week to one of the aminet sites. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 17:25:06 -0800 From: larry@postgres.Berkeley.EDU (Larry Rowe) Message-Id: <9303030125.AA25218@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> Subject: Re: REPOST: THE MPEG-FAQ - Version 1.1 [1/2] The ones [decoder] I can disclose are from Sony and one from North Valley Research (contact Todd Brunhoff - toddb@nvr.com). [ How about a free encoder running on Unix ? Where yous not working on it ? ] We are working on a freely distributed mpeg video encoder. But, it still has a ways to go. We're trying to produce a workable system quickly without too much focus on speed or ultimate coding efficiency. It will be available sometime within the next 3-4 months. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: pierce@netcom.com (Jerry Pierce) Subject: Re: MPEG on silicon Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 16:57:23 GMT E: REAL time MPEG encoder The GCT MPEG encoder announced in EETimes was designed by Nippon Steel and my company, Eidesign Technologies. (The relationship between ASCII, GCT, Nippon Steel, Hitachi, JVC is a long and complicated one--suffice to say the units have been designed and a few have been sold and DELIVERED.) We have one operating at Eidesign's headquarters in Mountain View, CA. The design is a three board set. The algorithm is Nippon Steel proprietary and is a FULL MPEG solution--I, P, and B frames. The resultant quality, in real time, is very good. We have compared favorably to C-Cube's non-real time algorithm. (I don't know how we will compare to their chip set.) We are adding a MPEG level 2 audio solution to the system (it is currently being implemented and not yet working--March?). The encoder box accepts CCIR 601 input (D1) and has a SCSI port to connect to a workstation for assembling the system layer. The box creates a complete MPEG video stream in REAL time (a delay of about 1 second from the time the video is presented to the box and the time it appears decoded by the decoder--H.261 it's not!) We are now using a Thomson MPEG video decoder to monitor the results. We (the design team is split between Eidesign and Nippon Steel) decided to build a flexible MPEG encoder using off-the-shelf chips and use it as soon as possible. This includes DSP's, FPGA's, motion estimation chips, etc. It IS flexible and we COULD implement other algorithms, however we are not using it as a research tool, but as a solution to acquisition of MPEG material for a variety of platforms. I suppose it could be used as a research tool. I don't know where/how they came up with the $250K price, but we are discussing the system with interested parties for specific configurations to meet their needs. A FULL up system with audio, video, and other design tools may cost this much. Jerry Pierce Eidesign Technologies 1923 Landings Drive Mountain View, CA 94043 415-903-9211 x15 pierce@eidesign.com or pierce@netcom.com =========================================================================== IX | ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ============================ From: gandhi@trix18.genie.uottawa.ca (rakeshkumar gandhi ) Date: Tue, 24 Nov 92 13:14:03 -0500 Subject: IEEE There is MPEG Hardware review in IEEE computer graphics and application magazine. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Only for Germans: Ihr koennt den MPEG-draft-I beim Beuth Verlag bekommem. =========================================================================== X | WHERE TO FIND MORE INFOS ============================= Well, first you can check the related news-groups: comp.graphics, comp.graphics.animation, comp.compression, comp.multimedia, comp.sys.amiga.multimedia, comp.mail.multi-media, alt.binaries.pictures.utilities The first part of this FAQ about MPEG came from Mark Adler, published in in FAQ for the newsgroup 'comp.compression'. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Then you can ask 'archie' to find all NEW mpeg-releated software by sending the following mail (with no title): prog mpeg mpg quit to one of the following archie-mail-servers: archie@archie.ans.net archie@archie.rutgers.edu archie@archie.sura.net archie@archie.mcgill.ca archie@archie.funet.fi archie@archie.au archie@archie.doc.ic.ac.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Then you could look for a newer version of the first part of this FAQ via ftp at: garbo.uwasa.fi (128.214.87.1), in /pub/doc-net The current version is named FAQC9301.ZIP --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Then read this (oh Bryan, you're gas ...): From: bryanw@rahul.net (Bryan Woodworth) Subject: MPEG VIEWERS FOR MSWIN/XWIN/VMS/AMIGA/MACINTOSH AVAILABLE! Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 21:26:37 GMT Last Updated: 30.3.93 12:32:34 MPEG VIEWERS FOR VARIOUS PLATFORMS: OBTAINMENT INFORMATION a. Microsoft Windows MPEG viewer info i. Xing's MPEG Player << Obtainable via email ii. An exciting port of the Berkeley MPEG player << Also via ftpmail b. Unix X-Windows viewer info << Also via ftpmail c. Macintosh viewer info << Also via ftpmail d. VMS viewer info << Also via ftpmail e. Amiga viewer info << Obtainable via many means besides ftp f. Reminders when obtaining files g. Information on obtaining files via email h. Where to obtain MPEG files i. Conclusion a. Windows MPEG viewer There are two Windows MPEG viewers. One is released by Xing Technology as freeware; the other is a Shareware viewer provided by a private party which is a port of the Berkeley v2.0 freeware MPEG player. First, I will detail Xing's MPEG player for Windows. i. Xing's freeware MPEG player for Windows, version 2.0. I am not certain if it works with Windows 3.0, but who cares, right? Everyone uses Windows 3.1! And I know it works with 3.1. :-) Once you have Windows all you need is any SVGA card. The Windows MPEG player works with ANY SVGA card, provided it has a driver for 640x480x256 colors in Windows 3.x. Read HELP.INSTALLING.MPEG.FOR.WINDOWS for more information (see below). You may obtain the viewer via toe, simtel20 mirrors via ftp (see below) or email (see SIMTEL20.EMAIL at ftp.rahul.net [192.160.13.1] in /pub/bryanw/information, or next posting if you are reading this in a Usenet newsgroup). Herewith is the ftp info: You can get the viewer from: Site: toe.cs.berkeley.edu [128.32.149.117] Dir : /pub/multimedia/mpeg/Windows3.x File: mpegexe.zip + attendant dll (such as mddlati.zip) The viewer is also available from all simtel20 mirrors. One specific site I can remember is as follows: Site: oak.oakland.edu Dir : /pub/msdos/windows3 File: mpegexe.zip, + attendant dll (such as mdllati.zip) Here is a listing of all simtel20 mirror sites, from a recent posting by w8sdz@TACOM-EMH1.Army.Mil (Keith Petersen) to comp.archives.msdos.announce. Please remember to use the ftp site closest to you geographically: SIMTEL20 files are also available by anonymous ftp from mirror sites OAK.Oakland.Edu (141.210.10.117), wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.135.4), ftp.uu.net (137.39.1.9), nic.funet.fi (128.214.6.100), src.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.3.7), nic.switch.ch (130.59.1.40), archie.au (139.130.4.6), nctuccca.edu.tw (140.111.3.21).... Please read HELP.INSTALLING.MPEG.FOR.WINDOWS, located on ftp.rahul.net, in /pub/bryanw/information, whence you obtained this file. It gives tips on installation and answers many questions. IP address for those whose servers don't accept names: ftp.rahul.net, 192.160.13.1 I spent a great amount of time compiling it, so I will hold a very low opinion of anyone who asks me for help without having read the HELP.INSTALLING.MPEG.FOR.WINDOWS file first. However, if there is a question you have which is not answered by the HELP.* file then please do send me email so I can add it to the HELP* file. ii. Berkeley MPEG player Port: Supports 15bit-24bit displays! The following is a verbatim transcription of an email message I received about this other player. It is worth a look. --- begin --- ~Date: Mon, 29 Mar 93 10:00:08 MST ~From: rwebb@nyx.cs.du.edu (Russell Webb) To: bryanw@rahul.net ~Subject: Re: FTP SITE AVAILABLE FOR MSDOS GRAPHICS/UNIX UTILITIES Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix @ U. of Denver Math/CS dept. I'm sorry to have seen your archive turned into a mini-archive, but your effort is still apreciated. Regarding the above information you currently provide: there is another MPEG player that you may have overlooked so far. Check toe.cs.berkeley.edu under /pub/multimedia/mpeg/ mpegnt.zip for a new (~March 15) Windows NT MPEG viewer, a port of the Berkeley Unix v2.0 player. It *will* run under Windows 3.1, but the Win32s subsystem is required. The Win32s package is bundled with the Spice32/ Nutmeg32 circuit design package that can be found on the ftp.cica.indiana.edu site (under /pub/pc/win3/nt/spice4?.zip, I believe). [ED. NOTE: ftp.cica.indiana.edu's IP address is 129.79.20.84] Why go through all the hassle of grabbing this if you don't have Windows NT? Because the player supports 15-bit and 24-bit color. It looks quite nice in comparison to the Xing player or an 8-bit X-Windows display. It's a bit slow (on my 486/50, 16M ram) and easy to crash--but still the only free way I know of to get a hi-color/truecolor MPEG display on a PC (short of having a 15- or 24-bit X terminal on Intel hardware). I hope this information is a bit useful. Thanks again for your mini-archive and information postings. -Russell Webb rwebb@nyx.cs.du.edu --- end --- b. Unix X-Windows MPEG viewer There is also an MPEG player for Unix X-windows platforms, which supposedly works fairly well. When I had Linux running on my 386/25 with X Windows, it worked fairly slowly, but this WAS an IBM 80386, no math compressor, and "only" 8 megs of ram. :-) Perhaps you will fare better. The term "X-Windows" encapsulates any computer which can run X-Windows software. These include Unix machines such as Suns, and other machines made by Hewlett Packard, etc. IBM computers can also emulate X-Windows using the Linux or 386BSD Operating Systems along with a port of the X windows environment. For Linux information read comp.os.linux; 386BSD, see the following newsgroups for information on 386BSD: comp.os.386bsd.announce comp.os.386bsd.apps comp.os.386bsd.bugs comp.os.386bsd.questions Site info: Site: toe.cs.berkeley.edu [128.32.149.117] Dir : /pub/multimedia/mpeg File: mpeg-* c. Macintosh MPEG viewer The Berkeley MPEG player seems to have provided the impetus for MPEG viewers on every system! The Berkeley MPEG viewer has now been ported to the Macintosh platform as well. Site info: Site: toe.cs.berkeley.edu [128.32.149.117] Dir : /pub/multimedia/mpeg/mac File: mpeg_mac_* d. VMS MPEG viewer Yet another port of the Berkeley MPEG player. Contains specific source for VMS machines which will aid in compilation. Site: toe.cs.berkeley.edu [128.32.149.117] Dir : /pub/multimedia/mpeg/vms File: Browse entire subdir, snag what you need e. Amiga MPEG viewers There are many MPEG viewers for the Amiga. They are all available via ftp from amiga.physik.unizh.ch [130.60.80.80] or one of its many mirrors. It is highly recommended you use the mirror geographically closest to you to reduce network bandwidth and increase transfer time. Here is a listing of all mirrors (including amiga.physik itself): Switzerland amiga.physik.unizh.ch 130.60.80.80 pub/aminet/ Switzerland litamiga.epfl.ch 128.178.151.32 pub/aminet/ Scandinavia ftp.luth.se 130.240.16.3 pub/aminet/ Germany ftp.uni-kl.de 131.246.9.95 pub/aminet/ Germany ftp.uni-erlangen.de 131.188.1.43 pub/aminet/ Germany ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de 130.149.17.7 pub/aminet/ Germany ftp.th-darmstadt.de 130.83.55.75 pub/aminet/ Germany ftp.uni-paderborn.de 131.234.2.32 pub/aminet/ USA ftp.wustl.edu 128.252.135.4 pub/aminet/ USA merlin.etsu.edu 192.43.199.20 pub/aminet/ USA oes.orst.edu 128.193.124.2 pub/aminet/ Australia splat.aarnet.edu.au 192.107.107.6 pub/aminet/ (*) (*) closed 6:30am to 4pm weekdays Here is a listing of filenames from the LONG.Z file. Merely cd to the proper subdirectory (in this case, /pub/aminet/gfx/show) and get what you need. Days Filename Directory Size/Old Description -------------------------------------------------------------------- mp.lha gfx/show 45K 83 MPEG player for EHB display. Needs OS2.0 mpeg2_0amiga.lha gfx/show 50K 40 Berkeley MPEG player 2.0 mpegplay201_bin.lha gfx/show 147K 43+MPEG player V2.01 executable mpegplay201_src.lha gfx/show 170K 43+MPEG player V2.01 sources mpeg_player122.lha gfx/show 206K 104+MPEG Player 1.22 (for all Amigas) You can also obtain the software via aminet using other means. From the README: OTHER AMINET ACCESSES --------------------- There are many other ways than FTP to access AmiNet: - ADT. This is a front end for FTP that allows easy access to AmiNet. Get it from comm/misc/ and compile it on your UNIX box. - FSP. AmiNet Files can be downloaded from the FSP site disun3.epfl.ch port 9999. Uploads are accepted and forwarded. - NFS. The only AmiNet site that allows NFS mounting of the archives is wuarchive.wust.edu. FTP there and read the details in the /README.NFS - IRC. On Internet Relay Chat, you can talk to various server robots like AmiBot, MerBot or Mama, to do queries and retrievals. - Gopher. There is a gopher server for AmiNet at merlin.etsu.edu. To connect, use the command 'gopher merlin.etsu.edu'. - Modem. In Germany, you can download the AmiNet files from the Incubus BBS, telephone number 0931 781464. The login is 'ftp', password 'ftp'. - Usenet. A list of recent uploads is posted every week to the newsgroups comp.sys.amiga.misc and de.comp.sys.amiga.misc. Useful for mail servers. - Mailserver. Sorry, no specialized e-mail server for AmiNet yet. But you can use ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com. Send a mail with HELP in the body. - CD-ROM. AmiNet is available on CD-ROM. Talk to info@cdrom.com, or write to Walnut Creek CDROM, 1547 Palos Verdes Mall, Walnut Creek CA 94596, USA or phone 1 800 786 9907, +1 510 674 0783 or +1 510 674 0821 (FAX) f. Reminders.. o Login anonymously. I.E. FTP server Omygosh-v2.21 "It's in there!", P in a Square Ltd READY. login: anonymous password: (enter your email address here, like "banshee@wicked.com") ...then you're in. o Use binary mode when transferring files from ftp sites. I.E. "type binary" or "binary" before transferring a file. E.g. ftp> binary Binary mode set. ftp> get mpegexe.zip ... g. Obtaining files via email Some of the sections above cover specific information for retrieving files via specific means, such as for the MSWIN Xing player (via simtel20's listservers) or the amiga (via other various means outlined in that section). For the remaining sections, it is possible to use the ftpmail server. FTPMAIL, obtaining files from a server via email which does the ftping for you, is not the best way to obtain files via ftp, but for some it is the only way. To get more information, send email to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com with the word HELP in the message body. h. Where to obtain MPEG files Now that you have your glorious MPEG viewer, where to obtain MPEG files to test your program? Luckily there are a few sites whence many MPEGs may be obtained. The best site for MPEGs is toe.cs.berkeley.edu [128.32.149.117], which has a veritable slew of MPEGs available in /pub/multimedia/mpeg/movies, and a glorious MPEG MEGA demo, crafted by Stefan Hartmann (leo@zelator.in-berlin.de) in /pub/multimedia/mpeg/genoa. Another good site for MPEGs is phoenix.oulu.fi [130.231.240.17], but please use this site sparingly unless you are right next door to Finland -- bandwidth is getting expensive these days! Most files available on phoenix are already at toe anyhow. Have fun! i. Conclusion MPEG is a fascinating animation format which is compact yet offers lots of animation for the space! With ports of the MPEG player available now for most major platforms, MPEG can now be shared by almost everyone. I hope you will enjoy MPEG as much as I have. Sometimes it's annoying searching for a viewer for your platform, but it's all worthwhile in the end. -Bryan -- Bryan Woodworth =========================================================================== XI | NEWS ========== Well, here the news from the CEBIT'93 in Hannover GERMANY: Nothing special happened (except the new NeXT-Station with Intel- Board, Expansion-Slot for the Pentium and Localbus running Mach486, X11 and Windows 3.1 under the same GUI: NeXTStep) and except the MPEG-News: Brainstorm was showing a Beta-Version of a player for the Atari. Its doing I-, P- and B-Frames and could perfectly play all the Xing-Movies. (Not sure about the big ones). More infos from: [ and read Section III.7 ] Raphael Lemoine at Brainstorm 19 bis Rue de Cotte 75012 Paris FRANCE Vocal: 1 - 44 67 08 09 Fax: 1 - 44 67 08 11 Modem: 1 - 44 67 08 44 Fidonet: 2:320/100.4 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leadtek was showing there DOS-full-screen-MPEG-player. They double the pixel in a tricky way, so they get 640x400 and the quality is really good. They told me, the player (with lots of additional software) is to buy for about $900. The contact address is: Mr. Terry Yeu at Leadtek Research Inc. Computer Graphics, Multimedia Design & Manufacture 5F, NO. 4, Alley 11, Lane 327, Sec. 2, Chung-Shan Rd., Chung-Ho, Taipei Shien, TAIWAN R.O.C. Tel: 886-2-2484101 Ext 113 Fax: 886-2-2484103 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sun has a new version of there 'Multimedia Solutions for Workgroup' out. And (but this is not official), they will support MPEG, but this was not to be seen. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ A new coding sheme for video arrived. It has NOTHING to do with MPEG, ] [ but it produces a fabulous frame-rate, the compression is much better, ] [ but therefore the quality is less than MPEG. Here the news: ] Date: Mon, 15 Mar 93 13:58:29 EST From: ruben@ee.uts.edu.au (Ruben Gonzalez) Subject: Re: riscdemo- more infos please ... > > We aim to solve these problems with our new technique. We get up to 40:1 > > compression (and rising) and frame rates of up to 100+ frames per second > > on a standard 486 IBM PC with a standard VGA card. No fancy anything > > is required. We've actually improved the compression quite a nit lately. > How does it work ? Well basically it does a bit of vector quantisation and we try to decompose the images into graphic primitives. > 100 frames of which size (how many colors) ? 120 fps at 176x144, we get about 35 fps at 352x288. All in 256 colours but there is no contouring artifacts as with *all* the other schemes that exist. > How do you compare it to MPEG ? Well they get a bit more compression, but their quality is quite a bit lower. Also the software MPEG version is not full MPEG just a portion of it. MPEG needs to do a DCT transform in reall time which is really time consuming, MPEG also need to do real time colour quantisation and we don't need to do any of this in fact our decoder is only about 50 lines long :^) Our version is fully extensible into hypermedia and full object level interaction, whereas the MPEG stuff is restricted to only multimedia with no intra frame- object level interaction. > but how does it really work, whats the algorithm to reach such a compression > without a DCT (f.e.) ? > Hey, a DCT does not give any compression either, it's the quantisation of and succeeding variable length (Huffman) coding of the transform coefficents that give rise to the compression. Of course the motion compensation also helps. Well as I said its a combination of adaptive vector quantisation and graphic primitive decomposition. We also make heavy use of human visual system's characteristics. To explain the entire algorithm would take up many pages since it is completely original and there is nothing I could sort of compare it too. Plus I'm not allowed to reveal certain parts of the algorithm. For further information please refer to : R.Gonzalez and A.Ginige, "Towards Integrating Digtial Video for Multimedia", Australian Broadband Switching and Services Symposium'92, Melbourne Australia. A.Ginige, A.Serevanute, R.Gonzalez et.al. "An Experimental Multimedia System" Computer Communication Review, Vol.22, No.3, July 1992. There are also other published papers on the algorithm floating around. > Could you maybe send me some of your compressed video's ? Or tell me, where > to ftp from ? Are there any documents, describing the technic ? You should be able to ftp some videos from : ftp.uts.edu.au under the directory /pub/RISCvideo I would compress some more videos but I'm busy working on the new improved version as well as porting the algorithm to MSWindows and other platforms and there is only one of me :(. Ruben Gonzalez. School of Electrical Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia [ The player itself is named : RISCDEMO.ZIP. ] =========================================================================== XII | QUESTIONS ================ These are some questions, ideas or whatever problems, where still no solutions is found or nobody knows an answer. Please contact me via e-mail if YOU find a solution for: 1) Is there somebody out there (maybe from the MPEG-group), that could rewrite the first section of this FAQ, to bring it up to MPEG-II ? 2) Is Xing connected to the internet or compuserve or something ? Is there somebody responsible for there product ? 3) Are there multimedia-specialized mailboxes out there ? Please send a filelisting of your mpeg-archive, a description of how to obtain the files, costs, connection times, telefon-numbers etc. 4) Is there a COMPLETE mpeg-stream somewhere out there ? Meaning including a system-, video- and audio-stream ... 5) Who can post something about the MPEG-card from Optibase ? Test ? Compatibility ? Prices ? Please mail to: phade@cs.tu-berlin.de if you have for inormation, than I have. =========================================================================== The end of ... THE MPEG-FAQ ====================================================== PHADE SOFTWARE Leibnizstr. 30, 1000 Berlin 12, GERMANY Inh. Frank Gadegast Fon/Fax: +49 30 3128103 phade@cs.tu-berlin.de ===========================================================================