Other MPEG Resources

This is a brain-dump of other MPEG resources that I knew about back in 1995 or so. I am completely uninterested in digital video and multimedia, and have not kept up to date on any developments in the field. However, I periodically get requests from poor deluded souls who think I must be some sort of MPEG expert. To dispel that illusion and get them off my back, I offer this collection of random, probably mostly out-of-date links.

My starting point for MPEG software was the multimedia group in the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley. You might want to

• visit their general multimedia FTP site
• visit the MPEG directory on their FTP site
• download mpeg_play 2.4 from Berkeley (source distribution; poke around their MPEG FTP directory for binaries or more recent versions)
• download mpeg_play 2.0 from the Brain Imaging Centre (this is the version of the Berkeley X11 MPEG player that was current in 1994 when I started the project)

Around 1994 and 1995, folks at the Geometry Center of the University of Minnesota were also interested in MPEG. Daeron Meyer of that lab modified Berkeley's mpeg_play to give it a pretty Motif front-end, and they also put some information on creating MPEGs on the web. You might want to:

• download Daeron Meyer's Motif-ified version of mpeg_play, from the BIC (this is the 1994 version -- I have no idea where to find a more recent copy)
• visit their "Making MPEG Movies" page

There was also an MPEG video research group (the Portable Video Research Group) at Stanford University in the early 90's. I have no pointers to their work, but we did put copies of some of it on the BIC's FTP site:

• download the PVRG MPEG encoder from the BIC FTP site
• download CV 1.2.2, a colourmap conversion utility that is necessary to use the PVRG encoder
• download a PVRG technical report that describes MPEG-1 video and their software

Finally, the MPEG.org web site seems a lot more up-to-date than most of this stuff; you can

• visit MPEG.org
• visit the MPEG Software Simulation Group's ftp site (in particular, look for their MPEG-2 coder/decoder, mpeg2vidcodec_v12; as I write this, only a source distribution is available)