[ excerpt from developer's site ] It is a free library for decoding mpeg-2 and mpeg-1 video streams. The main goals in libmpeg2 development are: Conformance - libmpeg2 is able to decode all mpeg streams that conform to certain restrictions: "constrained parameters" for mpeg-1, and "main profile" for mpeg-2. In practice, this is what most people are using. For streams that follow these restrictions, we believe libmpeg2 is 100% conformant to the mpeg standards - and we have a pretty extensive test suite to check this. Speed - for most current systems, the display will actually take more time than the mpeg-2 decoding. For systems that have hardware color conversion and scaling (as we can use with the xv extension in Xfree 4), you should be able to watch DVD streams on a Celeron 400. On a PIII/666 with null display you should get about 110 frames per second. Portability - most of the code is written in C, and when we use platform-specific optimizations we always have a generic C routine to fall back on.