mpeg

MPEG-1 Video decoder, MP2 Audio decoder and MPEG-PS Demuxer in pure Go.

Why

This is a simple way to get video playback into your app or game.

MPEG-1 is an old and inefficient codec, but it is still good enough for many use cases. The quality and compression ratio still holds up surprisingly well. Decoding costs very little CPU time compared to modern video formats. All patents related to MPEG-1 and MP2 have expired, so it is entirely free now.

Examples

• frames - extracts all frames from a video and saves them as JPEG
• video - video example using Ebitengine with accelerated YUV->RGB conversion
• player-rl - player using raylib with YUV->RGB conversion done on CPU
• player-sdl - player using SDL2 with accelerated YUV->RGB conversion
• player-sdl3 - player using SDL3 with accelerated YUV->RGB conversion
• player-web - player using WebGL and WebAudio, see live example
• player-xv - player using X11/XVideo and OSS, accelerated

Format

Most MPEG-PS (.mpg) files containing MPEG-1 video (mpeg1video) and MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (mp2) streams should work.

Note that .mpg files can also contain MPEG-2 video, which this library does not support.

You can encode video in a suitable format with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v mpeg1video -q:v 0 -c:a mp2 -format mpeg output.mpg

-q:v sets a fixed video quality with a variable bitrate, where 0 is the highest. You can use -b:v to set a fixed bitrate instead; e.g. -b:v 2000k for 2000 kbit/s. Refer to the FFmpeg documentation for more details.

If you have FFmpeg compiled with libtwolame (an optimised MP2 encoder), you can use -c:a libtwolame -b:a 224k instead of -c:a mp2.

If you just want to test the library quickly, try this file: https://gen2brain.github.io/mpeg/sintel.mpg Example players are also able to handle HTTP streams so you can use the URL directly.

Build tags

• noasm - do not use assembly optimizations

Credits

• pl_mpeg by Dominic Szablewski.
• javampeg1video by Korandi Zoltan.
• kjmp2 by Martin J. Fiedler.