MPP - A preprocessor tool for creating MPEG and other movie streams

MPP stands for Movie PreProcessor. It prepares a set of images for inclusion into a movie. Mpp was written to allow the processing of heterogeneous material (e.g. images with different sizes and file formats, text pages in yet another format) into a homogeneous set of frame files. It is also does some basic title generation. Mpp does the following processing of images:

• Convert images from different formats into a single common format. The recognition of many image formats is automatic.
• Scale images of different sizes to a single common size with several possible methods.
• Create empty frames of any color.
• Paste text into frames - thereby creating titles and more.
• Paste other images into frames. The paste can be masked, so that you may create titles with any text processing or drawing program and paste them into frames.
• Multiplicate a single frame (with links -> no extra disk space required) in order to have it incorporated several times in a movie (still frames and/or slow-motion effects).

MPP is written in Perl and requires version 5.003 or higher. It also uses Jef Poskanzers pbmplus library and the mpeg_encode> program available from the University of Berkeley. You can have a look at the MPP man page or grab the complete MPP program (which contains the man page in POD format).