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libzvbi - VBI capture and decoding library
Copyright (C) 2000-2008 Michael H. Schimek
Copyright (C) 2000, 2001 Iñaki GarcÃa Etxebarria
Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, 2007 Tom Zoerner
Originally based on AleVT 1.5.1 by Edgar Toernig
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
file COPYING.LIB for more details.
Software in this package which is not part of the library,
including code generators, programs in the test and contrib
directories, and the VBI proxy daemon, are licensed under the
terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING
for more details.
Programs in the examples directory are licensed under a 2-clause
BSD-style license. See the respective source files for details.
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Introduction
============
The vertical blanking interval (VBI) is an interval in an analog
television signal that temporarily suspends transmission of the
signal for the electron gun to move back up to the first line of the
television screen to trace the next screen field. The vertical
blanking interval can be used to carry data, since anything sent
during the VBI would naturally not be displayed; various test
signals, closed captioning, and other digital data can be sent
during this time period.
The ZVBI library provides functions to read from Linux V4L, V4L2 and
FreeBSD BKTR raw VBI capture devices, from Linux DVB devices and
from a VBI proxy to share V4L and V4L2 VBI devices between multiple
applications.
It can demodulate raw to sliced VBI data in software, with support
for a wide range of formats, has functions to decode several popular
services including Teletext and Closed Caption, a Teletext cache
with search function, various text export and rendering functions.
Basically ZVBI offers all functions needed by VBI applications
except for the user interface. The library was written for the
Zapping TV viewer http://zapping.sourceforge.net.
For details on using the library see the documentation in doc/html
(built only if you have Doxygen http://www.doxygen.org/ installed)
and the files in the test and examples directories.
Bindings
========
Tom Zoerner wrote a Perl interface to libzvbi. The ZVBI Perl module
covers all exported libzvbi functions. Most of the functions and
parameters are exposed nearly identical, or with minor adaptions for
the Perl idiom.
Find out more at http://search.cpan.org/~TOMZO/Video-ZVBI
Download
========
The latest version is available from http://zapping.sourceforge.net
as a tarball and publicly readable CVS.
Christian Marillat maintains a Debian package:
http://packages.debian.org/source/zvbi
Oliver Lehmann maintains a FreeBSD port:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=libzvbi
For RPMs please see the repository of your distribution.
Sourceforge can notify you about new releases by e-mail:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zapping
Installation
============
If you checked out the sources from CVS, run "./autogen.sh" to create
missing configuration and make files.
To build and install type "./configure", "make", "make check" if you
want to run some tests, and "make install".
For additional instructions see the INSTALL file.
The library has been tested on Linux and FreeBSD.
Questions, comments, concerns, complaints, irritations, aggravations,
insinuations, allegations, accusations, contemplations, consternations
======================================================================
* You can post patches, feature requests and bug reports on
our Sourceforge project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zapping
Please log in or leave an e-mail address for further inquiries and
progress notification.
* Or you can send a message to the Zapping mailing list:
zapping-misc@lists.sourceforge.net
You can subscribe or unsubscribe at:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/zapping-misc
Subscription is not required, but non-member messages may be
delayed for spam filtering. This is a low volume list.
You can browse the list archives at:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=zapping-misc
Primary author and maintainer of this library is
Michael H. Schimek <mschimek@users.sourceforge.net>
Encrypted e-mail is welcome. You can find my PGP/GPG key in the
AUTHORS file, e.g. type "gpg --import <AUTHORS". Ich spreche deutsch.