This is release 1.2 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 to output the converted video ('Flask'
is popular MPEG stream converter).


        1) System Requirements
        2) Installation
        3) How to initiate a conversion
        4) Known Problems
        5) Little Feature
        6) Acknowledgement
        7) Legal statement
        8) License




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

o Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP/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.  If you downloaded the 'mediator.exe' version
just run 'mediator.exe' and follow the instructions (you obviously
already did this as you are reading this text).

Plugins:

MPEG Mediator uses 'Flask'-style plugins to output the converted
video. 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
'Plugins'-menu.

3) How to initiate a conversion
-------------------------------

- Choose "Open" from the "File"-menu
- Add all files that comprise the whole video stream in their
  appropriate order to the stream list
- Choose "Ok"
- Select an audio track (if available) in the "Audio Tracks" menu
- Choose an Output-Plugin from the "Plugins"-menu
- Select "Configure Plugin..."
- Choose the settings and confirm your selections
- Choose the name of the output file by selecting "Set Output File"
  from the "Plugins"-menu
- Hit "Start Conversion" in the "Action"-menu

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

Plugins:

Most problems reported by several people 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 during testing the
current version was caused by bad behaving plugins (especially older
Flask-plugins for AVI-output, including Flasks OpenDML AVI Plugin).
The Plugin that comes with the current version of MPEG Mediator
should not cause any such problems.

MPEG-Compliance:

MPEG-streams that do not fully comply to the MPEG-standard are known
to cause most of the other problems reported. This often 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
TMPGEnc, a popular MPEG Encoder.

DVD-Decryption:

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 Mediator's 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 Holtzmann and Michel Lespinasse
  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 is heavily based
  on the GPL'ed OpenDML-AVI Plugin written by Alberto Vigata. It also
  includes code from "VirtualDub" by Avery Lee.

o The bbMPEG plugin was written by Brent Beyeler. bbMPEG is released
  as freeware.

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 before converting/copying
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