frei0r is a simple

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

framework for video effects. It provides filters, mixers and generators by means of minimalistic plugin API. The behaviour of the effects can be controlled from the host through simple parameters. The intent is to solve the recurring reimplementation or adaptation issue of standard video effects. Frei0r is not meant as a generic API for all kinds of video applications. There is no support for the requirements of special application areas like non-linear editors (NLE), hardware accelerated

shader In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...

effects, or high precision video processing. What frei0r does provide, besides a collection of usable video plugins, are C and C++ code reference implementations for over 100 different video manipulation algorithms, licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

. The frei0r API is not meant to be a competing standard to more ambitious efforts. The current implementation of frei0r is very lightweight, consisting of just a single C/C++

header file Many programming languages and other computer files have a directive, often called include (sometimes copy or import), that causes the contents of the specified file to be inserted into the original file. These included files are called copybooks ...

. Since its birth in 2004 frei0r became a de facto standard video plugin collection for several free and open source applications, as

LADSPA LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API. It is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was originally d ...

did for audio plugins.

History

Frei0r is the result of a collective effort in coordination between several software developers meeting in the premises of the Bergen Center for Electronic Arts in a festival called Piksel. Between 2003 and 2005 an attempt was made to find a common standard for video effect plugins to be used among various applications: Andraz Tori (

Cinelerra Cinelerra is a video editing and composition program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for Linux. It is free software distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. In addition to editing, it supports advanced composition opera ...

community version), Daniel Fischer (Pakt/

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

), Denis Jaromil Rojo ( FreeJ/Dyne), Gabriel "Salsaman" Finch (

LiVES Lives may refer to: * The plural form of a ''life'' * Lives, Iran, a village in Khuzestan Province, Iran * The number of lives in a video game * ''Parallel Lives'', aka ''Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans'', a series of biographies of famous m ...

), Kentaro Fukuchi (EffecTV), Niels Elburg (VeeJay), Øyvind Kolås (GEGL/babl/

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...

), Tom Schouten (PDP/

PureData Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open-source project with a large d ...

), Artem Baguinski (V2_Lab), Georg Seidel, Martin Bayer and Phillip Promesberger (Gephex) all took part in the discussions. The group first aimed at the realization of a comprehensive specification for dynamically loaded plugins named LiViDO (Linux Video Dynamic Objects) which then spawned two implementations: one being the minimalistic ''frei0r'' presented by the Gephex team as a humorous parody of LiViDO, and the other one being WEED which offered more features for GUI integration and parameter handling. Within the span of a few years, the minimalistic approach of frei0r has been widely adopted amongst many applications and become a de facto standard. Maintenance and further refinements were contributed by Carlo Prelz (MøB/BEK), Richard Spindler (Open Movie Editor), Jean-Sébastien Senécal (DRONE) and Dan Dennedy ( MLT/

Kdenlive Kdenlive (; acronym for ''KDE Non-Linear Video Editor'') is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of develop ...

). Frei0r plugins are fully cross-platform, they are found in several Linux and BSD distributions, available for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

as part of the Fink and

MacPorts MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a package manager for macOS and Darwin. It is an open-source software project that aims to simplify the installation of other open source software. It's similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collections ...

projects and easily compiled on Windows platforms using

Cmake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates ano ...

and

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed. The Cygwin i ...

Applications which use frei0r

* openmovieeditor * gephex * MøB * FreeJ *

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of ...

AVconv Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. History Fork from FFmpeg The Libav project was a fork of the FFmpeg project. It was announced ...

* DVEdit *

and Pitivi * MLT **

Shotcut Shotcut is a free and open-source, cross-platform video, audio, and image editing program for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows. Started in 2011 by Dan Dennedy, Shotcut is developed on the MLT Multimedia Framework, in development since 200 ...

OpenShot Video Editor OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source video editor for Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. The project started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective of providing a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor. The p ...

* gmerlin * Flowblade *

Liquidsoap Liquidsoap is a scripting language oriented toward the creation of audio and video streams, the manipulation of multimedia files, automation, serving as webserver back-end and more. The language is functional, statically typed with type inference ...

References

frei0r initial announcement

Piksel Festival, Norway

Free Software Directory

frei0r page at Freshmeat

External links

* {{official website
frei0r API documentation

frei0r-devel mailing list

Free multimedia software Multimedia frameworks GStreamer