Mjpeg tools 1.8.0 review

The mjpeg programs are a set of tools that can do recording of videos and playback, simple cut-and-paste editing and the MPEG compres

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Gernot Ziegler

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The mjpeg programs are a set of tools that can do recording of videos and playback, simple cut-and-paste editing and the MPEG compression of audio and video under Linux.

Recording is supported for the Zoran based cards like the Buz (Iomega), DC10 (MIRO, Pinnacle), Matrox Marvel cards and the LML33 (Linux Media Labs). See related pages to the right to find the right driver for your card.

The recorded videos can be converted to MPEG streams. The software playback of MPEG streams works with almost every player and every OS.

You can produce special forms of MPEG streams like VCD (Video CD) and SVCD for hardware playback.

A key design objective of the tools is interoperability with other video tools:
The tools can be used used to edit, playback and compress motion JPEG (MJPEG) AVI's captured using the xawtv package.

The tools can be used to edit playback and compress MJPEG streams created and editted with broadcast 2000. N.b. the current mpeg2movie high bit-rate MPEG encoder is in large part derived from an obsolescent snapshot of the mjpegtools MPEG encoder.

What's New in This Release:
changes in YUV4MPEG2 API to offer support for multiple colorspaces (particularly useful for DV video), so that multiple planar YUV formats (also monochrome or alpha) are supported.
most filtering tools have been adapted to support multiple YUV formats, so that you will not lose quality/precision in conversion steps.
Many new or dramatically improved filters including (but not limited to):
*) yuvdenoise (denoising filter)
*) yuvdeinterlace (intelligent deinterlacing program)
*) y4munsharp (unsharp mask image sharpening program)
Improvements in the IDCT/DCT routines in the MPEG-1/-2 encoder (much more exact now and not subject to overflow/truncation on the IA32 arch).
MANY new utilties for importing/exporting data:
*) New and improved PGM/PNM conversion programs for dealing with PPM data.
*) Utilities to convert raw (headerless) YUV data to and from YUV4MPEG2 format. Useful when interfacing with other program suites.
*) Program (yuyvtoy4m) to convert 4:2:2 data from digital cameras into YUV4MPEG2 format for use with mjpegtools.
*) y4mstabilizer for stabilizing images with unsteady camera work
Improvements and fixes in 'mplex' for handling PCM audio (LPCM audio actually works now)
DPME (Dual Prime Motion Estimation) in the encoder (mpeg2enc) is fully functional (it was present but buggy/artifacted in the earlier releases)
Rate control in the encoder improved considerably.
Much better Quicktime file handling (via libquicktime) especially the audio tracks.
Besides the always-excellent x86 support, we now have full support for AMD64 (including MMX/SSE/etc. optimizations) and for PPC (e.g. Linux or OS/X), and win32 support is also available (via Cygwin/Mingw).