Graphics, Audio, Video
Curator: Charles Fox
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 Licence
This is a technical coding introduction to Linux multimedia libraries and tools including graphics, sound, and video programming. Linux famously allows many competing libraries and tools to provide similar functions from which the open source community eventually select the best. This eventually gives great tools but can be quite confusing for beginner programmers as they are faced with many alternative ways to do everything. The idea in this document is to select only the best of breed of everything and present them together. It's like a Linux distribution in making these selections. But it is a distribution of ideas and choices rather than of actual software. (unless we do a Docker as well). As such, the choice of what to leave out and not cover is also important. The idea is to present a single, best, toolkit, of tools which work and which also work well with one another as in a distro. This is not a detailed tech manual. The purpose is to present the best tools for media tasks, and to give basic but compilable hello-world examples of code to help get new project started. I use these code snippets all the time when I need to make small new projects based on libraries I might not have used for a while and need to remember how to set them up. After that it's usually easy to consult their big docs on the net to get details for the specific things I need to do.
The document is an attempt at open sourcing some of my written notes using github and Creative Commons. I am collecting all my little text and code snippits from over the years of working with Linux graphics, sound and video into one place and thought I might as well share them in case they are useful to anyone. They are based on about my last 10 years of working as an academic and commercial researcher in pattern multimedia pattern recongition in machine vision, speech recongition, computer music and robotics, and have been used to implement the systems in my research papers (\url{https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=dQ7RURYAAAAJ&hl=en}). As I just finished writing my Springer book "Data Science for Transport" it's easy to reuse the book template, though this is just intended as a loose collection of stuff, not an actual book itself. Maybe one day this might get big enough to make an actual but fully open-source and continually updated commuity book as sometimes printed by O'Reilly Community Press (\url{www.oreilly.com/openbook/}) or No Starch Press (\url{https://nostarch.com/writeforus}). Continual updating would be really important as like a distro all these tool are constantly changing. The plan is to keep it on github where others can fork it and send back pull requests for incorporation in the main version, both to grow the text and to keep all the software versions up to date. Github also allows readers to edit the text within the github webpage, without having to download to their own machine, this is a really quick and easy way to fix things so please if anyone out there happens to be reading this just go ahead, fork, edit and send a pull request to help keep up to date. If you make useful edits and would like to add your name to the author list then please ask and I will add it.