                              Dali
	           Release 1.0, February 1, 1999
	          http://www.cs.cornell.edu/dali/

This note is to announce the release of Dali 1.0.  Our goals in building
Dali were (1) to make it easy to write high-performance code that
processes multimedia data, (2) create a library of routines that allows
me to teach students about multimedia data types, and (3) provide a
platform for sharing programs that encode, decode, and process
multimedia data.  (In other words, We got tired of hacking up mpeg_play).
Hence, over the past two years, we have been designing and building a 
toolkit that addresses (and solves) these problems.

OVERVIEW

The Dali library allows programmers to easily write very high
performance code that encodes, decodes, or processes multimedia data.
For example, an MPEG decoder can be written in about 150 lines of C code
using Dali, but is very easy to customize and use in new applications.
Dali currently has bindings to C and Tcl.

Dali is an excellent tool for teaching students about multimedia
processing and encoding.  Dali exposes the structure of underlying
bitstreams, since many optimizations exploit this structure.  For
instance, Dali exposes MPEG frame types, making it easy to write
programs that process only I frames.

FORMATS AND EXTENSIONS

Dali currently supports a variety of image, video, and audio formats,
including MPEG audio, video, and systems stream decoding,
MPEG video encoding, JPEG encoding and decoding, GIF encoding and
encoding, PNM encoding and decoding, AVI encoding and decoding
(Windows systems only), and WAVE audio files (PCM, mu-law, and
A-law). 

Dali is designed to be easy to extend.  Dali is organized as a series of
packages.  A new package can be easily written and distributed.
Furthermore, we have articulated the design principles clearly in a
paper that appeared at MMCN 99 (the paper is available on the Dali
website).

PLATFORMS, AVAILABILITY, AND RESOURCES

The package is intended to be portable to many platforms. It has been
tested under UNIX (BSD and SYSV, e.g. Linux, Solaris, and SunOS)
and Windows NT/95.

The Dali web site (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/dali/) is chock full of
documentation, examples, tutorials, and other supporting
material.  The Dali web site also contains precompiled binaries
for Windows 95/NT, SunOS, and Solaris.

A mailing list (dali-l@cornell.edu) has been set up for communication
among Dali users, developers, and advocates.  In keeping with the
Open Source philosophy, we want to take a very egalitarian view
towards contributions, debugging, and help.  Bugs, questions, answers,
and announcements will all be distributed by this list.
