The plug-in API defined by Netscape, defines two sets of functions: One residing within the browser, to be called by the plug-in, and one inside the plug-in to be called by the browser. The functions are used for communication between the browser and the plug-in.
An already existing MPEG decoder was chosen to do the MPEG decoding part of the plug-in. The choice was between two freely available coders, and after some testing, the decision fell on mpeg_play. Unnecessary code was removed, and the input routines were rewritten to allow a separate process to feed the data through pipes, instead of reading it from a file. A small API was defined for the MPEG decoder, to simplify connecting it to the plug-in code.
Due to the way Netscape Navigator reserves colors from the X Window System, the colors in the plug-in subwindow were not very good when the display hardware supported only one colormap.