I have already said on some forums that I have some plans for small and larger
patches. One of them I plan is mpeg port to povray. POV-Ray has already some
animation features hovewer when you wan't embed some animated pigment then you
have a problem. You can split animation to many separated files and script
code to follow frames of POV-animation. But it requires:
- space on drives
- parsing time
- additional work when animattion is designed
- dedicated script
It all can be easy done when short animation like for example animated pattern
is used. The problem appear when you want to put movie on animation like for
example TV show viewed by character.
My plan was to use mpegs the same way as images just with additional word
'timeline FLOAT' used:
  image_map { mpeg "movie.mpg" timeline .1 }
Timeline value could be from 0..1 range where 0 is first and 1 is last frame
of "movie.mpg". If the timeline shots between frames of original movie then
neighbour frames would be weighted accordingly. All other image modifiers like
'interpolate', 'once', 'transmit all', etc. could work. All other places like
hf, function{} where image can be used could work. I hope You like this
idea...

So what's my problem ? Mpeg library !

I want to take widely used, tested library similiar to libpng, zlib, libtif...
ported to standard 3.5. I have already investigated some resources but I found
some problems so decided to find help in community. Usually unix/linux users
has best experience with free libraries. Unfortunatelly I'm average windows
user. I have found some library in some linux distribution and have asked its
author for help but got following response:

  ISTR another MPEG decoding library at www.mpeg.org.  There are also lots
  of pretty good MPEG players for Linux -- my guess is that *somewhere*
  out there is a high-quality, free MPEG decoding library.  Mine isn't it.

But he missed I already checked www.mpeg.org and got following response:

  This is an automatic answer.
  The authors of the MSSG software have disapeared and left no forwarding     
  address.

So would you like to help me finding best, well-tested, widely-used mpeg
library ? Am I missed something ? MPEG2 support could be nice but not
necessary. Portability necessary. Thanks in advance :-)

ABX

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