TextMedia 1.0
DirectShow textmode output application
Copyright 2001 Jari Komppa
http://iki.fi/sol



Usage:

From command line, you can give TextMedia some media file as a parameter.
In Windows2000 you can drag media files on top of the exe file, or right-
click on a media file and pick open with->choose program and select
TextMedia.

Being a DirectShow8 application it requires DirectX8 in order to work.

TextMedia does not require the accompanied textmedia.avi file; it has been
included just for demonstration purposes.




Legal:

This material is not freeware. You are allowed to copy it without
restrictions for non-commercial use.

No payment of any kind may be charged for this product or any combination
of products or services including this product without our authorization
and official written license.

Commercial use, especially the industrial manufacturing on any data
storage media and their distribution without the expressed permission of
the producer, is strictly prohibited.

This program or the data files contained therein may not be altered or
modified without the permission of the author.

You take full responsibility for the operation of this software and any
consequences thereof. We the creators can not accept liability for damages
or failures arising from the use of this software.



Keys:

A - aspect correction
    - Toggles between 'ignore', '4:3', '1:1' and '16:9' modes. Since
      there is no sane way of figuring out the aspect ratio of the
      textmode (as fonts may vary) you can use this to find a suitable
      aspect ratio for your output.

Alt-enter - fullscreen
    - Press alt-enter to go to fullscreen and return back to windowed
      mode.
      
D - desaturate
    - Toggles desaturation filter. Desaturation filter removes color 
      information. The AsciiArt renderer is also affected by this, 
      since it only reads the green component as input. Activating
      this filter effectively causes the AsciiArt filter to use all 
      of the components instead of just the green one.
      
E - equalize
    - Toggles equalize filter. Equalize filter scans the whole framebuffer
      on each frame, finding the darkest and lightest colors, and then
      scales all the colors in the framebuffer so that all lightness
      levels are used.
      
Esc - quit
    - The escape key quits the application.                

H - help 
    - Displays list of available keys
    
O - output mode
    - Toggles between AsciiArt and BlockColor output modes.
    
N/M - lightness
    - The N and M keys alter the lightness value.
    
Z/X - contrast
    - The Z and X keys alter the contrast value. 
    


Internals:

Internally TextMedia is a DirectShow application with a custom output
filter. The text output uses TextFX4 library by Jari Komppa (at 
iki.fi/sol). 

Being a DirectShow application, TextMedia can play just about everything
that windows media player can - so yes, if you have DivX codec, you can
watch DivX .AVI files with TextMedia. And yes, there is sound.

As a limiting factor the text output filter only accepts 24bit input,
so if you try to play some media file that does not support this (such
as 8-bit .GIFs or DVD .VOBs) another output window will pop up, and no 
output will be given in textmode.

