Multimedia Stack

Multimedia Software Stack for ARM

Multimedia is one of the most important reasons Linux is used on ARM: mobile phones, tablets, digital TV stations and desktop all fundamentally require multimedia playback and recording. It is also one of the most complex and poorly-understood areas on Linux, stemming from the inherent challenges in providing high performance multimedia, IP restrictions on technology and content and the impressive rate at which new formats and capabilities have been developed to match increasing network and processing power.

Technology:

OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real time computer vision, developed by Intel and now supported by Willow Garage. It is free for use under the open source BSD license. The library is cross-platform. It focuses mainly on real-time  image processing.

FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia  data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line program for transcoding  multimedia files.

Vp8 is an open video compression format released by Google, originally created by On2 Technologies. Google also released the source code for libvpx, a reference implementation of VP8. Currently, libvpx is the only software library capable of encoding VP8 video streams. A new VP8 encoder based on the x264 framework is under development. In the WebM container format, the VP8 video is used with Vorbis audio.

X264 is a free software library for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. ( H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video.)

GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework written in the C programming language with the type system based on GObject. GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback, recording, streaming and editing. The pipeline design serves as a base to create many types of multimedia applications such as video editors, streaming media broadcasters, and media players.