downloaded from: bertola.eu on October 2024 original description: VMPEG is a fast software decoder for MPEG encoded video sequences. Both video and audio are decoded in real-time (with frame-dropping, if the processor is not fast enough) and output synchronously to the graphics card and sound card of the PC. There are currently two major application areas for MPEG-1 software decoding: Video CD playback and transmission of video via the Internet (e.g. World Wide Web). Video CD is by far the more ambitious task. You will need at least a Pentium 90, a PCI graphics card, and a 2x (better 4x) CD-ROM. Best results are obtained when using a DCI graphics cards accelarating some of the decoding steps with dedicated hardware. VMPEG supports system layer MPEG streams (the type used on Video CDs), video only MPEG streams (many streams on the Internet are of this type), and video only MPEG streams accompanied by unencoded wave audio files (.wav files). The latter is not 'real' MPEG, it is not standardized by ISO/ITU-T, but it has been used for some applications in the past (it requires less computational resources than MPEG audio), and there are still a lot of such streams available. Audio only streams (*.mp2) are currently not supported. Direct playback from harddisk, CD-ROM and Video CD are possible with VMPEG. Video CD format differs from CD-ROM by using more data (and less error-correction) per sector (2324 bytes instead of 2048), which improves the video quality because less compression is required. Video CD playback capability depends on the CD drive and the associated drivers to support reading this modified sector format. I can not guarantee that it will work with your CD drive. Just try it out. Playback of older CDs labeled 'Digital Video on CDi' but not showing the Video CD logo (Green Book format), are currently not supported. VMPEG supports a variety of interfaces to the graphics card. GDI (Graphics Device Interface) is the slowest alternative, used only if none of the faster interfaces is available. WinG, which is included in the VMPEG archive, improves speed considerably for most graphics cards in 8 bit mode (256 colors). VMPEG also supports DrawDIB. This requires installation of the Video for Windows runtime system (msvideo.dll etc.). It slighlty improves TrueColor playback and comes with a 256 color dithering algorithm that works for arbitrary scale factors (but is much slower than the algorithms used by VMPEG internally). The third interface supported by VMPEG is DCI, which permits the use of certain hardware acceleration features of graphics cards (color space conversion, scaling). VMPEG comes with an MCI driver which permits using the Media Player (and many other MCI based applications) to play MPEG files in a manner similar to Video for Windows AVI files. The most noticeable advantage of using the MCI driver is random access into the MPEG stream (via the position slider of the Media Player). The MCI driver now covers most of the applicable MCI commands from the MCI digital video extensions, the MPEG MCI command set (OM-1 Open MPEG Windows API), and even some of the AVI extensions.. The MPEG player also comes with a stand-alone user interface, which you can use instead (or in addition) to the Media Player. It does not support random access in the stream, but provides some useful menu options to obtain additional information on the MPEG stream and the playback performance. VMPEG is a Windows 3.1 application, it requires no upgrades (like Win32s). It also runs in Windows 95. Using VMPEG on Windows NT is not recommended, it doesn't seem to run stable there. While WinG is included in the full VMPEG archive, it is also available separately by anonymous ftp: WinG: ftp.microsoft.com:/developr/drg/WinG/WinG10.ZIP The Video for windows runtime (currently version 1.1e) is at: VfW runtime: ftp.microsoft.com:/softlib/mslfiles/wv1160.exe The 'official' distribution site for VMPEG is ftp.netcom.com:/pub/cf/cfogg/vmpeg/ Refer to this location for the most recent release of VMPEG.