The Continuous Media Toolkit (CMT) is a toolkit for multimedia applications. It is built on top of Tcl/Tk, a scripting language and graphical user interface toolkit, and Tcl-DP, which provides network tools included a remote procedure call package and a name server. CMT is freely distributed and is very portable. It has been compiled and tested on the following platforms:
CMT supports several audio and video encoding formats, including Sparc style audio (8-bit mu-law compressed or 16-bit linear), MPEG video, MJPEG video, and H.261 video. It contains support for a number of audio interfaces including the Sparc, Linux, and Irix devices, as well as DEC's AudioFile. It also contains software MPEG, MJPEG, and H.261 decoders as well as the capability to perform hardware assisted decompression using the Sun Parallax, SunVideo, DEC J300, or SGI Cosmo board.
The toolkit is implemented as a collection of objects, each of which handles a specific task, for example, reading MPEG encoded video from a file or decoding and displaying MPEG encoded video. Objects can be easily created and connected to build applications. Aside from objects that read or decode audio and video, a number of other interesting objects are available, including:
CMT also comes with the CMplayer, a sample CMT application that can be used to play audio and video files locally or from a CMT video file server.
The previous version of CMT was version 3.0 beta 3. The CMT 3.0 source tree as well as pre compiled binaries for the various CMT executables and CMPlayer are available in the pages below:
We are currently in the middle of a major revision to CMT. The new version is 4.0 and the first beta release was isssued in June 1997. It is based on Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1 (or later) and (unlike CMT 3.0) does not require modifications to Tcl or Tk. Rather, all CMT objects are implemented as dynamically loadable packages.
To learn more about CMT and how to write CMT applications, consult the CMT Documentation, all of which is available on line.
CMT is developed by the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, led by Professor Larry Rowe of the Computer Science Department at the University of California at Berkeley. More information on the team of people developing CMT is available here.
A mailing list is available for CMT related questions. The list is monitored by the CMT developers as well as a number of other people who use CMT. The mailing list is cmt-users@plateau.cs.berkeley.edu. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@plateau.cs.berkeley.edu with the subject line subscribe cmt-users-list.
The Berkeley Continous Media Toolkit