MPEG-1 Video Player for Java 0.9 (beta)

                   Copyright (C) 1998 Carlos Hasan


Introduction
============

This software is a MPEG-1 video stream decoder written in Java which can be
used embedded inside of Web pages or other applications. However, the author
makes no claim that this software is in any way a fully compliant decoder of
MPEG-1 video streams defined by the standard ISO/IEC 11172-2.


Author
======

Carlos Hasan
chasan@dcc.uchile.cl

Department of Computer Science
University of Chile
Santiago, Chile


Usage
=====

Use the following HTML code to place the player inside of your Web pages:

<applet code=MPEGPlayer archive="MPEGPlayer.jar" width=320 height=240>
 <param name=source value="file.mpg">
 <param name=repeat value="true">
</applet>

Your Web browser or applet viewer should have support for Java and JDK 1.x
applcations. This code has been tested with Sun's Java Developer Kit 1.1.5
and Netscape Communicator 4.04 for Linux and Windows 95.

If your browser doesn't support JAR files then you will have to extract the
Java classes from the archive using any ZIP decompressor (ie. GNU unzip,
WinZip for Windows 95, etc).

It is highly recommended to use fast Java virtual machines (JVM) and/or
just-in-time compilers (JIT) to achieve good frame rates.


Benchmarks
==========

The following benchmarks were performed using the included MPEG-1 video
stream called random.mpg (thanks to the guys of http://www.mpeg.org) which
has a lot of bidirectional predicted B-pictures that usually need more
processing power than intra coded and forward predicted frames.

Java JVM                      JIT  O.S.		Machine	     FPS
--------------------------------------------------------------------
JDK 1.1.3                     Y    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz   6.8
JDK 1.1.3                     N    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz   1.2
JDK 1.1.3                     N    Linux 2.0    P5 266 MHz   1.2
Internet Explorer 3.02        Y    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz   7.6 (*)
Internet Explorer 3.02        N    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz   0.5
Internet Explorer 3.02        Y    Windows 95   P5 166 MHz   1.4 (*)
Internet Explorer 3.02        N    Windows 95   P5 166 MHz   0.3
Netscape Navigator 3.01       Y    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz   7.8
Netscape Navigator 3.01       N    Linux 2.0    P5 266 Mhz   0.4
Netscape Communicator 4.04    Y    Windows 95   P5 266 MHz  13.9
Netscape Communicator 4.04    Y    Windows 95   P5 166 MHz   5.0

(*) MSIE 3.02 throws null pointer exceptions when the JIT is enabled.


Comments
========

Please send comments to:

  chasan@dcc.uchile.cl


License
=======

This program 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.