July, 31, 2003

Release of NMM 0.3.0

The Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM) provides an
architecture that allows to create distributed multimedia application
easily: local and remote multimedia devices or software components can
be controlled transparently and integrated into a common multimedia
processing flow graph. NMM runs under Linux, is implemented in C++,
and distributed under the LGPL.  For more information, see:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/NMM/

The Multimedia-Box application is based on NMM and provides an
integrated software solution for a Multimedia Home-Entertainment
Center running on a commodity Linux-PC. Following features are
available:
- CD-Player with CDDB support
- CD-Grabber and transcoding to MP3/OggVorbis
- DVD-Player with support for menus
- DVD-Grabber with transcoding to DivX video and MPEG audio in an AVI 
  file. Furthermore, the transcoding task can transparently be 
  distributed to remote hosts that provide more processing power.
- TV (analog or digital) plus time-shifting. Furthermore, for hosts that 
  do not have direct access to a analog or digital TV source (e.g. via a 
  PCI board), a remote host can transparently provide this 
  functionality.
- Simple EPG for digital-TV, simple video recorder functionality
- Play-list: creation of play lists with all supported media types.
- Configuration dialog
- Multi-tasking: watch TV while transcoding a DVD.
- All controllable with a remote-control (or via keyboard when 
  running as standard desktop application)
- Customizable on-screen display (skinning)
- Extensible and configurable application framework (XML)

For more information, see:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/NMM/Status/MMBox/index.html

Warning: As this release provides the latest features of the
Multimedia-Box, the 0.1.3 release is more stable (but does not provide
networking features).

Together, the 0.3.0 release consists of several parts:
(1) The NMM-base system
(2) Over 50 plug-ins (called NMM-Nodes) 
  that allow to access multimedia devices like
  - Video boards
  - Sound boards
  - TV-tuner boards
  - DVB boards
  - CD/DVD drives
  - Firewire devices
  - VISCA cameras
  - ... and many more
  or provide different software processing components like
  - MPEG video decoder
  - MPEG audio encoder/decoder
  - Ogg/Vorbis encoder/decoder
  - MPEG demultiplexer 
  - DivX encoder/decoder
  - AVI multiplexer/demultiplexer and reader/writer
  - Colorspace converters
  - Video effects
  - Audio filters
  - Audio visualization
  - ... and many more

(3) a variety of small example applications demonstrating the
functionality of the plug-ins

(4) The Multimedia-Box application as described above and three
different skins: blue, las_vegas, icon.

(5) A registry service, that administrates all resources available at
host. This service can be requested from local or remote applications.

(6) A Qt-application called qregwizard that shows the current status
of the registry

(7) qcamcontrol: a Qt-application that allows to control local and
remote Firewire cameras.

(8) clic: CommandLine Interaction and Configuration. An application
for setting up distributed multimedia flow graphs from a high-level
specification - a so called graph description stored in a
.gd-file. Many .gd-files are also included that allow - for example -
distributed grabbing and transcoding DVDs.

(9) All documentation that can also be found online.

Download: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/NMM/Download/index.html

If you would like to get involved in the development of NMM, or you
want to develop an application on top of NMM, or you simply want to
ask a question or report a bug, you are welcome to subscribe to our
developer mailing list [nmm-dev] at:
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nmm-dev (english
only, please)