Hi there, we are happy to announce our next major release: NMM 0.7.0 "Size matters" 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://www.networkmultimedia.org Furthermore, NMM provides several services which are required in a distributed multimedia environment: * A registry service which discovers and manages available resources, like hardware or software plugins, efficiently. In addition it enables distributed applications to access locally resources. See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/first-steps/index.html and http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/server-registry/index.html for some information and examples. * For distributed and synchronized play back of audio or video, NMM provides a distributed synchronization service using the Network Time Protocol (NTP). An introduction how to set up NTP for NMM can be found here http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/ntp/index.html. * The concept of session sharing allows to share parts of an active multimedia session and provides synchronized and distributed media playback on various devices within different applications. For more information, see http://www.networkmultimedia.org/Publications/2003/session-sharing-mips2003.pdf NEW in this release are: * Added new GraphBuilder which automatically creates a flow graph from a given URL. It also allows to create a distributed flow graph and to play back audio and video on distributed hosts or to access remote sources. See the hellographbuilder examples at http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/helloworld/index.html for more information. * Multimedia-Box: - Playlist uses the new GraphBuilder for audio and video play back. - TVState provides a new search engine which uses predefined and user defined categories to search easily the epg information for your favorite program via remote control. The corresponding key assignment can be found here: http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/mmboxcontrol/index.html - many minor bug fixes and feature enhancements * clic: - Unified the syntax of clic and integrated our new GraphBuilder to playback given URLs. Added some simple keyboard controls while playback an URL. See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/clic/index.html for more information and some examples. * Updated NMM engine for the amaroK audio player. See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/Status/amaroK/index.html for more information. * improved automatic plugin loading (run './apps/serverregistry -s) * Changed plugin management and registration. Now each plugin should be stored into a separate library (update started). Plugin developer should read our tutorial about "Developing Plug-ins for NMM" http://www.networkmultimedia.org/current/Docs/plugins/index.html) for further information * Replaced most of our examples by graph descriptions. * Added VideoCropNode to display parts of a video frame. For example this node can be used to realize a distributed video wall. See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/NMM/current/Docs/videowall/index.html. for an example configuration. A demonstration video (14 MB)can be found at: ftp://www.networkmultimedia.org/NMM/Status/Videowall/NMM_videowall_oct2004.avi * Updated IceCastNode to latest icecast version * Introduced a thread pool which improves the network performance for instream and out of band communication. * many bugfixes in plug-ins and NMM base Together, the 0.7.0 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 and Sound boards, - TV-tuner and DVB boards - CD/DVD drives - Firewire devices - VISCA cameras - ... and many more or provide different software processing components like - MPEG video decoder/demultiplexer - MPEG audio encoder/decoder/demultiplexer - Ogg/Vorbis encoder/decoder/demultiplexer - DivX encoder/decoder - AVI multiplexer/demultiplexer and reader/writer - Colorspace converters - Video effects - Audio filters and visualization - ... and many more See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/NMM/current/Docs/pluginlist/index.html. for a complete list of supported plugins (3) 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, DVD-Player with support for menus and a Play-list for creation of play lists with all supported media types. - CD-Grabber and DVD-Grabber with transcoding capabilities to different audio and video formats. Furthermore, the DVD 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. - Video recorder functionality and Electronic Program Guide using either DVB or XMLTV as data source and simple web interface - 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) with six different skins: blue, blues, las_vegas, icon, ct-skin1, ct-skin2. - Extensible and configurable application framework (XML) - For more information, see: http://www.networkmultimedia.org/Status/MMBox/index.html (4) 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. (5) some small example applications demonstrating the functionality of the plug-ins (6) A registry service, that administrates all resources available at a host. This service can be requested from local or remote applications. (7) A Qt-application called qregwizard that shows the current status of the registry (8) qcamcontrol: a Qt-application that allows to control local and remote Firewire cameras. (9) All documentation that can also be found online. This release provides support for gcc 3.3 and 3.4. We also provide pre-compiled version of external libraries for both gcc 2.95 and gcc 3.x, please see README in the tar.gz archive. Download: http://www.networkmultimedia.org/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) Furthermore, we provide an irc-channel on freenode. See http://www.networkmultimedia.org/Contact/irc/index.html for additional information. Best regards Michael