MPEG Tools

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.
Transcoding of MPEG-2 streams to MPEG-2/MPEG-1 is supported through patches to the output drivers for mpeg2dec and ac3dec tools from the Linux Video and DVD Project.
dv2jpg converts a DV codec-encoded AVI stream (from dvgrab, for example) to an mjpeg-encoded AVI stream that can be processed by the mjpeg tools package. The mjpeg AVI can be converted to mpeg video/audio and burned onto a VCD later.
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