PyMedia Readme
   Version 1.3.8
   by Dmitry Borisov http://www.pymedia.org
   dborisov@pymedia.org

   About

     PyMedia is a Python cross-platfrom library designed to make it easy to
     write multimedia software, such as multimedia aware apps.
     Small size makes it perfect for embedded mutlimedia software 
     development. 
     It requires the Python language.

   Installation

     The installation is pretty simple is you have Python 2.3+ installed.
     Just type: "python setup.py build" as normal user and 
     "python setup.py install" as superuser. You may wish to run latter without
     the first one. As superuser of course.
     If you wish to be able to play movies, you'll need SDL/DirectFB to be installed.
     For Windows users there is a better way of making it work:
     	Just download binaries from the web site, run it and you're all set.

   Help

     If you want to get started with some hands on experience, just go to the 
     examples directory. You'll find some usefull but simple examples of how you 
     can use multimedia features directly from Python. 
     Then if you need additional information and features description, open the
     docs/index.html.
    
     Visit PyMedia's website( http://pymedia.org/ ), there is documentation

     section as well. 
     Be aware that the online documentation stays up to date with the development
     version of PyMedia in cvs. This may be a bit newer than the version of PyMedia you are using.

   Credits

     Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute to this library.
     Special thanks are also in order.

     Elena K - for creating such a great web site for PyMedia
     Drew Perttula <drewp@bigasterisk.com> - for making -fPIC fix during installation
     Matthias Baas <baas@ira.uka.de> - for submitting the patch on better exception naming
     Lane Dailey <rldailey@blarg.net> - for gcc-3.4.* patch

   Dependencies

     PyMedia has no external dependencies if you use basic funtionality.
     Hovewer if you want to get more codecs, you should install appropriate 
     libraries. Here is the list:
     - libvorbis
     - libogg

     - mp3lame
     - libfaad2

   Video playback
 
     In case if you wish to play movies, there are 2 choices:

         1. pygame-1.6.0 with patch
             http://66.159.221.186/pygame-1.6-overlay.patch.gz
         2. If you're lucky enough to use one of the DirectFB's supported video card, you may use
             DirectFB-0.9.20 along with
             pydfb-1.0.2 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pymedia/
            In this case just set PYCAR_DISPLAY=directfb.

   Todo / Ideas
   
     * Better external codecs support
     * Support for dvd hw decoding
     * Support for usb devices

   License

     This library is distributed under GNU LGPL version 2.1, which can
     be found in the file "docs/LGPL". I reserve the right to place
     future versions of this library under a different license.
     http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

     This basically means you can use PyMedia in any project you want,
     but if you make any changes or additions to PyMedia itself, those
     must be released with a compatible license. (preferably submitted
     back to the PyMedia project). Closed source and commercial apps are
     fine as long as you provide a way to link against the latest version 
     of PyMedia.

     The programs in the "examples" directory are in the public domain.  
  
  Best wishes !