

 libkate, a library for encoding and decoding Kate streams
 Kate bitstream 0.5



This is libkate, the reference implementation of a codec for the Kate bitstream
format.
Kate is a karaoke and text codec meant for encapsulation in an Ogg container.
It can carry Unicode text, images, and animate them.

Kate is meant to be used for karaoke alongside audio/video streams (typically
Vorbis and Theora), movie subtitles, song lyrics, and anything that needs text
data at arbitrary time intervals.

The latest version of libkate can be found at:

http://libkate.googlecode.com/

More information can be found at the xiph wiki:

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggKate

A Git repository can be found at:

http://git.xiph.org/?p=users/oggk/kate.git;a=summary

libtiger, a rendering library for Kate streams using Pango and Cairo, is at:

http://libtiger.googlecode.com/

For build instructions, see INSTALL.

A sample encoder and decoder are included in this distribution, in the
tools directory.

To encode a Kate stream from a kate text file:

$ kateenc -t kate -o output.kate.ogg input.kate


To encode a Kate stream from a SubRip (.srt) format file:

$ katedec -t srt -o output.kate.ogg input.srt


To decode a Kate stream:

$ katedec -o output.kate input.kate.ogg


In addition, two more tools are available:

katalyzer displays various information about Kate streams.

KateDJ is a GUI remixing program for Kate streams in Ogg. It uses wxPython,
a set of Python bindings for wxWidgets, which might not be universally
available.
KateDJ also depends on the oggz tools, available from www.annodex.net.

For more info on those tools, see the man pages in the doc/man directory.

VLC 0.9 can decode and display basic text and SPU based Kate streams.
VLC 1.0, soon to be released, will have full rendering support using libtiger.
I have preliminary support for Kate streams for MPlayer, xine, and GStreamer
(and thus all players that rely on them for decoding), which will be contributed
to those projects once the Kate bitstream format is stable. The current diffs
for those can be found in the diffs directory. See the README in the diffs
directory for more information on those patches. If you want to run some of
the example streams, you will have to patch GStreamer, xine, or MPlayer.
NOTE: the diffs tree is not shipped in the tarballs anymore, it is now only
available in the git tree.


This distribution is Copyright (C) 2008 Vincent Penquerc'h.

   Use, distribution and reproduction of this library is governed
   by a BSD style source license included with this source in the
   file 'COPYING'. Please read these terms before distributing.

