Section 9.7. Multimedia Toolkits and Development Environments


9.7. Multimedia Toolkits and Development Environments

KDE and GNOME have already been discussed. They provide basic support for graphics and sound that can be used for multimedia applications if they are not too demanding. If you want to do more, or if KDE or GNOME does not fit your needs, there are other toolkits available that are worth considering. This section briefly mentions some of the more popular multimedia toolkits and libraries available for Linux.


Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL )

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL , and 2D video framebuffers. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award-winning Linux port of Civilization: Call to Power.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.

The project home page is http://www.libsdl.org.


OpenGL

OpenGL is a standardized API for 2D and 3D graphics programming developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). It supports rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. More information can be found at http://www.opengl.org.

There are several free implementations of OpenGL support under Linux. The most popular is Mesa. Because it is not licensed from SGI, it cannot officially be called OpenGL, but it is designed to be compatible. The Mesa project home page is http://www.mesa3d.org.


OpenAL

OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications. Conceptually, you can think of OpenAL as a 3D rendering library for audio just as OpenGL is a 3D rendering library for graphics.

The project's home page is http://www.openal.org.


JACK

JACK is a low-latency audio server, written for POSIX-conformant operating systems such as GNU/Linux and Apple's OS X. It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (i.e., as normal applications), or they can run within the JACK server (i.e., as a plug-in).

The JACK home page is http://jackit.sourceforge.net.


GStreamer

GStreamer is a library that allows the construction of graphs of media-handling components, ranging from simple sound file playback to complex audio mixing and video nonlinear editing. Applications can take advantage of advances in codec and filter technology transparently. Developers can add new codecs and filters by writing a simple plug-in with a clean, generic interface.

The GStreamer web site is http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org.


Network Multimedia Middleware (NMM)

NMM is a multimedia middleware package that allows the creation of distributed multimedia applications . A number of plug-ins supporting various media types, operations, and I/O devices are included. NMM has been used to implement a multimedia application that provides an extensible home entertainment system for DVD/CD playback and frame grabbing, TV with time-shifting, video recording, and playlist creation and playback for all supported media types.

More information can be found at http://www.networkmultimedia.org.


Media Applications Server (MAS)

The Media Application Server (MAS) is a time-aware arbiter of video and audio hardware, meant to scale the gamut of systems, from embedded to massively parallel, from handheld devices to supercomputers, from a microphone source to a speech recognition engine sink. MAS is a multimedia routing server. It moves multimedia data across the Internet virtually in real time, ensuring quality presentation of video, audio, and other time-sensitive information.

For more information on MAS, see http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net.


Multimedia distributions

There are some Linux distributions being developed that are optimized to be used as multimedia platforms. One such project is AGNULA, which stands for A GNU/Linux Audio distribution. With funding from the European Commission, it is developing two reference Linux distributions of free software: DeMuDi (Debian-based Multimedia Distribution) and ReHMuDi (Red Hat-based Multimedia Distribution). The project's home page is http://www.agnula.org.



Running Linux
Running Linux
ISBN: 0596007604
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 220

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