Revel - the Really Easy Video Encoding Library
http://revel.sourceforge.net
Copyright (C) 2004 Cort Stratton <cort at cortstratton dot org>


ABOUT
-----
Revel is a C/C++ library designed to be the shortest, simplest path
between your application and high-quality well-compressed video
output.  Any program that generates a series of successive images can
use Revel to output a compressed AVI video, without having to know
hardly anything about the overwhelming esoterica of video encoding.

Key features:
 - The most straightforward video encoding library the author has ever seen.
 - High-quality, high-compression MPEG-4 video encoding based on the
   XviD codec (translation: Revel makes really pretty, really small videos
   that most people can watch without downloading special software).
 - Free!


INSTALLATION
------------
0) Prerequisite: in order to compile Revel from source, you'll first need
   to compile and install the XviD core libraries, available from
   http://www.xvid.org/.
1) Compile Revel.  If you're on a Unix system, run "./configure ;
   make ; make check ; make install".  If you're on a Windows system,
   you're probably better off downloading a binary installation of
   the Revel libraries (available from the Revel download page).  As an
   added bonus, the Windows binaries are statically linked against the
   latest version of the XviD libraries, for true plug & play action!


USAGE
-----
The reveltest.cpp file (located in Revel's src directory) provides a
complete example of Revel in action.  For more details about the
options available, consult the revel.h header file.  There's only like
three enums, two structs and five functions in the whole API, so an
additional tutorial seems like overkill at the moment.

It's worth mentioning that the AVI files created by Revel are encoded
with the XviD codec (a variant of DivX, itself a specific
implementation of MPEG-4 -- but see this is exactly the sort of crap
that Revel aims to help you avoid).  In order to view them, you need
to have a video player capable of playing DivX video:

 - Windows Media Player 10 apparently supports DivX right out of the
   box.  Make sure your copy is up to date using Windows Update.
 - DivX.com has players available for Windows and MacOS
   (http://www.divx.com/divx/download/).
 - I don't know about Unix options.  I only use Unix over a
   command-line these days.  Google is your friend.
