The Berkeley MPEG Player.

mpeg_play is an MPEG player written in C. By default is uses X11 to display the decoded movies. It can optionally produce PPM files, SVGA graphics (Linux), Windows graphics calls, or work in a Mac window. It does not handle real-time synchronization or audio streams.

The most recent version is 2.4. There have been many changes over the years. Click here to ftp the source. Alternatively, we have compiled binaries for:

There are more obscure ports of the player, some of which apply only to earlier versions:

Reporting bugs:

If you find any bugs in this software, please mail bugs to mpeg-bugs@plateau.cs.berkeley.edu. Since this software is unsupported, we make no guarantees about how long it will take to fix the bug, or if it will be fixed at all. Bug fixes will be cheerfully accepted. Please include as much detailed information as possible, including:

  1. the version number of the program you are using
  2. the data file that caused the bug (if possible)
  3. the OS version and machine type you ran the program on
  4. the compiler used to compile the program

Future plans:

Our future plans include porting the decoder to run on other platforms, integrating it into a video playback system that supports real-time synchronization and audio streams, and further experiments to improve the performance of the decoder. Vendors or other organizations interested in supporting this research or discussing other aspects of this project should contact Larry Rowe at Rowe@CS.Berkeley.EDU.

Demo MPEGs

BMRC Publications BIBS