This is version 2.9 of blinkentools, the next generation set of
command-line utilities for Blinkenlights.

Check out http://www.blinkenlights.de/ to learn more about the
Blinkenlights project.

This release of blinkentools includes the following tools:
  
 b2b    - a converter between the different formats for Blinkenlights movies.
	  It is best used thru one of its aliases: b2blm, b2bml and b2gif.

 b2mng  - converts Blinkenlights movies to MNG files. 
 b2png  - converts single Blinkenlights movie frames to PNG images.
 b2jpeg - converts single Blinkenlights movie frames to JPEG images.
          (these three tools use the same themes that blinkensim uses)

 blinkenproxy - an advanced multiplexer that acts as a server from which
                clients can request a stream of Blinkenlights UDP packets

 bmultiplexer - forwards a stream of Blinkenlights UDP packets to multiple
	        recipients.

 bplay  - shows Blinkenlights movies on the text console (needs aalib)

 bsend  - reads Blinkenlights movies and sends them over the net using the
          Blinkenlights network protocol.

If you pass the --enable-oldtools option to configure, the following
obsoleted tools are built as well:

 blm2gif  - creates animated GIFs from Blinkenlights movies
 gif2blm  - creates Blinkenlights movies from animated GIFs
 blmplay  - plays Blinkenlights movies to the text console

More tools may be added in future releases.


The scripts directory holds a shell script called b2avi that uses b2b,
b2png and mencoder (from the mplayer package) to create a DivX4 from a
Blinkenlights movie.


blinkentools-2.9 depends on blib >= 1.1.7 and glib-2.0. The b2mng
utility depends on libmng-1.0 (the newer the better). You will also
need pkg-config in order to compile blinkentools. If you installed
blib into a different prefix than pkg-config, you may need to adapt
the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable. See the pkg-config(1)
man-page.

The file INSTALL has generic installation instructions. It all boils
down to calling './configure' in the toplevel dir, then 'make' followed
by 'make install'.


The code is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License
version 2 any later version. You will find a copy of this license in the
file COPYING.


Feel free to send questions, bug-reports, feature requests and patches
to the author Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org>.


Have Blinkenfun,

   Sven Neumann