• Mash is a comprehensive toolkit for multimedia communication and collaboration over the Internet using IP multicast. Mash supports live media broadcasting, N-way conferencing, and session capture and replay.
  
  
• Mash is an outgrowth of the Internet MBone tools developed to support streaming audio and video applications. Mash includes its own versions of MBone tools like sdr, vic, and vat.
  
  
• Mash is an open-source project that depends on the support of users and developers like you.
  
  
• MASH is a "Multimedia Architecture that Scales across Heterogeneous environments". We pretend the original acronym never existed.

How do I get started with Open Mash?
You can download the binary distribution of the code, install it on your computer, and then run the audio and video streaming tools vat and vic, respectively. You must have audio and video capture devices installed in your computer to use these tools. Sadly, configuring these devices is often difficult. Some helpful notes are available at configuring audio/video devices. You should also join the OpenMash-Users list where you can ask questions and search for other users (see mailing list management page).

How do I develop new applications and services using Open Mash?
Open Mash is a split-language system, which means it is written in more than one programming language, in this case C/C++ and Tcl/Tk. Code that requires high performance is coded in C/C++ (e.g., media encoders and decoders), and user-interface code and other code that is less sensitive to performance is coded in the Tcl and Tk scripting languages.

You can develop your own Tcl/Tk scripts and run them using the mash and smash interpreters included in the binary distribution. The Open Mash tutorials show you how to create new scripts and run them. If you need to modify the C/C++ code, for example, to add a new codec or a network abstraction, you will need to download the source distribution and rebuild the interpreters. We maintain a CVS repository that you can use to access the most recent stable release or the current modified version of the code. More information on development resources is available on the developer web pages.

What license is Mash distributed under?
Mash is distributed under the BSD license or, more precisely, what GNU calls the modified BSD license. Mash is OSI Certified Open Source Software and is GNU GPL-compatible.

Can Mash be used in commercial products?
The vast majority of the source code used in Mash does not have any restrictions on commercial use. However, a few small portions (CellB, Netvideo, XML Parser) may not be used commercially without the prior permission of the copyright holders. You should either obtain the proper permissions or compile without these pieces of code. See the LICENSE file distributed with Mash for more information.