Multimedia

Here are some miscellaneous resources related to audio, video and graphics systems under Linux:

Also see the section on User Interfaces.

CELF 2.0 Specification for AVG
(more like a set of recommendations rather than a specification)

Audio Video Working Group
Please see the CELF wiki for more information: Audio Video Graphics Working Group

What is DirectFB, How Does DirectFB Work
DirectFB

Sample Implementation of DirectFB on an embedded Linux platform
Porting DirectFB

Some DirectFB benchmark on embedded Linux platform
Benchmark DirectFB

Framebuffer

 * http://www.kernel.org/ (1) KD26/fb
 * http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net/fbdev/HOWTO/
 * http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO.html

DirectFB

 * http://www.directfb.org/
 * http://www.directfb.org/documentation/DirectFB_overview_V0.2.pdf
 * DirectFB

X11

 * http://www.x.org/
 * X11

NanoX

 * http://www.microwindows.org/

OpenGL (OpenML)

 * http://www.opengl.org/
 * http://www.khronos.org/opengles/

SDL

 * http://www.libsdl.org/ immediate renderer library with very bare bones primitives like rectangle fill and blit. Since it exposes just framebuffer and few primitives, it's easy to port to different platforms, actually it was born as a way to port Windows games to Linux.

Cairo

 * http://www.cairographics.org/ is an immediate renderer library that can do complex vector graphics, including matrix transforms. It runs on top of DirectFB, X11, memory buffers and more. It is the base of some toolkits like GTK and applications like Firefox.

Clutter

 * http://clutter-project.org/ is an object-oriented 3d canvas on top of OpenGL (or OpenGL-ES) with scene management. It is based on GLib/GObject and matches nicely GNOME platform. Many powerful Linux mobile devices will ship with Clutter-based intefaces in near future, like Intel's Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile and Maemo.

Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL)

 * http://www.enlightenment.org/ contains Evas, an object-oriented 2d canvs on top of OpenGL/X11, XRender/X11, X11, FB, DirectFB, DirectDraw and more. It includes scene management and integrates with Ecore, matches nicely other EFL components like Edje. It's used by some media centers and the OpenMoko phone.

Gstreamer

 * http://www.gstreamer.net/ is a modular media engine based on pipelines, you can construct them as you wish to either record or playback, from/to any media supported by its plugins. It's very flexible, but that also makes it complex to use, however it ships with helpers like playbin and decodebin to make simple case easy to use. It is built on top of GLib/GObject and integrates well with GNOME platform, but can be used with others as well.

Xine

 * http://xinehq.de/ is a playback media engine that handles most of the complexity for you. It's based on threads, so clock and synchronization are handled automatically. May worth noticing that this library is GPL and your application must be GPL as well to use it.

MPlayer

 * http://mplayerhq.hu/ it's not a library but an application, however it's controllable from other applications and it's used as media framework for some systems. It's GPL as well as xine, but since it's externally controlled you don't need to make your application GPL to use it.

Documentation

 * Presentation Choosing embedded graphical libraries held by Thomas Petazzoni at the ELCE 2008

V4L[2]

 * http://www.kernel.org/ (1) KD26/video4linux
 * http://bytesex.org/v4l/

OpenML

 * http://www.khronos.org/openml/

LinuxTV (DVB API)

 * http://www.linuxtv.org

OSS

 * http://www.kernel.org/ (1) KD26/sound/oss
 * http://www.4front-tech.com/oss.html

ALSA

 * http://www.kernel.org/ (1) KD26/sound/alsa
 * http://www.alsa-project.org

OpenAL

 * http://www.openal.org/

Video Lan

 * http://www.videolan.org

Freevo

 * http://freevo.sourceforge.net

LinuxTV

 * http://www.linuxtv.org/

MythTV

 * http://www.mythtv.org/

DVR

 * http://dvr.sourceforge.net/html/main.html

OpenPVR

 * http://www.funktronics.ca/openpvr/
 * http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpvr/

Morphine.TV

 * http://wiki.morphine.tv
 * http://sourceforge.net/projects/mms4l/

ARIB architecture

 * http://www.arib.or.jp/english/html/overview/ov/std_b24.html

Boot Splash

 * www.bootsplash.org

Digital Home Working Group

 * http://www.dhwg.org/

Disko Framework

 * http://www.diskohq.org
 * http://www.directfb.org

Free Type

 * http://freetype.sourceforge.net/freetype2/

UPnP

 * see UPnP

TV Anytime

 * http://www.tv-anytime.org/

TV Linux Alliance

 * http://www.tvlinuxalliance.com/

Note (1) - KD26 refers to the Linux 2.6.X kernel tree, which has a "Documentation" sub-directory.