This is release 1.0 of MPEG Mediator, a free and easy to use
MPEG-Video stream converter. 

MPEG Mediator supports MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 streams (Transport Streams
are not supported) including AC-3, MPEG and LPCM audio-substreams.
MPEG Mediator provides a great amount of flexibility through its use
of 'Flask'-style plugins for outputting the converted video ('Flask'
is popular MPEG stream converter).


1) System Requirements
----------------------

o Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP/ME (not confirmed to run under Win95, NT, XP and ME)
o MMX-enhanced CPU

2) Installation
---------------

There is no need for a special installation procedure. Just unzip
the archive to a folder and run 'MPEG Mediator.exe' from that
folder, that's it.

Plugins:

MPEG Mediator uses 'Flask'-style plugins for output. To use a new
plugin for output copy its file to MPEG Mediators program directory
and rename it to have the suffix '.prm' (e.g. 'odmlavioutput.prm').
After restarting MPEG Mediator the newly installed plugin should
appear in MPEG Mediators 'Plugin'-menu.

3) How to...
------------

The usage of MPEG Mediator should be pretty much self-explaining :)

4) Problems
-----------

Most problems reported during the beta-testing phase were caused by
special configurations of output-plugin/selected codec. Trying out
another plugin/codec should show if the problem is really caused by
MPEG Mediator. Also almost any crash or freeze reported during beta
testing was caused by bad behaving plugins (especially older
Flask-plugins for AVI-output).

MPEG-streams that do not fully comply to the MPEG-standard are known
to cause most of the other problems reported. This most time shows
up in MPEG Mediator saying 'MPEG Program Stream timestamp underflow'
or 'Program stream syntax error'. The only procedure to fix such
streams is to demultiplex (i.e. extract video and audio to different
files) the stream and then remultiplex it again (i.e. merge video and
audio again to one file). This can be achieved for example with
TMPEGEnc, a free MPEG Encoder.

For legal reasons MPEG Mediator does not and will never unscramble
CSS-encrypted MPEG streams (CSS ist the encryption method used on
DVDs). On loading such files MPEG Mediator may show unpredictable
behaviour.

5) Little Feature
-----------------

If you copy any '.bmp' picture to MPEG Mediators program directory
and rename it to 'wallpaper.bmp' this picture will be used as a
background for MPEG Mediators program window when there is no video
loaded.

6) Acknowledgement
------------------

o MPEG Mediators video decoder is based on the freely available
  'mpeg2dec' by the MPEG Software Simulation Group (MSSG).

o MPEG Mediator uses 'liba52' by Aaron Holtzman for AC-3 audio
  decoding. 'liba52' is released under the terms of the GNU General
  Public License.

o MPEG Mediator uses 'mpglib' (part of 'mpg123') by Michael Hipp for
  MPEG audio decoding. 'mpglib' is released under the terms of the
  GNU General Public License.

o MPEG Mediator uses colorspace-conversion and
  motion-compensation-code based in part on code found in the
  'DVD2AVI'-project by Chia-chen Kuo. DVD2AVI is released under
  the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

o The OpenDML-AVI plugin that comes with MPEG Mediator was written
  by the author of 'FlaskMPEG XiS' (also known as 'XMPEG'). It is
  based on the GNU GPL'ed OpenDML-AVI Plugin written by Alberto Vigata.

Thanks to all those persons for sharing their ideas by making their
sourcecodes available to the public.

7) Legal statement
------------------

Please consider your local copyright restrictions when converting
copyrighted material. The author of MPEG Mediator cannot be made
responsible for any copyright violations resulting from the use of
MPEG Mediator.


8) License
----------

MPEG Mediator is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

MPEG Mediator is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA