Frei0r

Frei0r is a minimalistic plugin API for video effects.

The main emphasis is on simplicity for an API that will round up the most common video effects into simple filters, sources and mixers that can be controlled by parameters.

It's our hope that this way these simple effects can be shared between many applications, avoiding their reimplementation by different projects.

Frei0r is not meant as a competing standard to more ambitious efforts that try to satisfy the needs of many different applications and more complex effects.

It is not meant as a generic API for all kinds of video applications, as it doesn't provides things like an extensive parameter mechanism or event handling.

Eventually the frei0r API can be wrapped by higher level APIs expanding its functionalities (for instance as GStreamer, MLT, FFmpeg and others do).

If you like to peek in what's boiling in the pot, have a look at our TODO

Developers are sporadically contributing and we are happy if more people like to get involved, so let us know about your creations! Code and patches are well accepted, get in touch with us on the mailinglist.

You might want to look at the code in frei0r more in detail, then browse the existing effects by visiting the Frei0r plugin gallery.

Frei0r has been around since 2006, born from yearly brainstormings held at the Piksel conference with the participation of various free and open source video software developers.

It is mostly adopted on GNU/Linux and OSX platforms, counts more than 80 effects implemented and is used by free video applications as PureData, Open Movie Editor, DVEdit, Gephex, LiVES, FreeJ, MøB, VeeJay, MLT and KDEnLive among the others.

Find our more on the Wikipedia page about Frei0r.

Stable frei0r releases are packaged periodically and distributed on

ftp://ftp.dyne.org/frei0r

We encourage the unauthorized mirroring of this source repository by all those interested, using the command

rsync -Pr rsync.dyne.org::frei0r .

Frei0r sourcecode is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and, eventually other compatible Free Software licenses.

The latest source for frei0r plugins can be attained using our revisioning system GIT

 git clone git://code.dyne.org/frei0r.git

Daily snapshots are on the FTP and on www.piksel.no/frei0r/snapshot

Binary packages are mantained for Debian (QA) and Ubuntu (pkg), to install the stable version distributed use apt-get or synaptic:

 sudo apt-get install frei0r-plugins

MacPorts provide ready to install packages for OSX: in case you have this packaging system installed, you just need to open a terminal and give the following command:

sudo port install frei0r-plugins

While the main source of documentation for the Frei0r API is the header, the sourcecode is well commented so you can study its full doxyfied documentation online.

A simple skeleton for a frei0r video filter looks like this:

#include <frei0r.hpp>

typedef struct {
  int16_t w, h;
  uint8_t bpp;
  uint32_t size;
} ScreenGeometry;

class MyExample: public frei0r::filter {
public:
  MyExample(int wdt, int hgt);
  ~MyExample();
  virtual void update();
private:
  ScreenGeometry geo;
  void _init(int wdt, int hgt);
}

MyExample::MyExample() { /* constructor */ }
MyExample::~MyExample() { /* destructor */ }

void MyExample::_init(int wdt, int hgt) {
  geo.w = wdt;
  geo.h = hgt;
  geo.bpp = 32; // this filter works only in RGBA 32bit
  geo.size = geo.w*geo.h*(geo.bpp/8); // calculate the size in bytes
}

void MyExample::update() {
  // we get video input via buffer pointer (void*)in 
  uint32_t *src = (uint32_t*)in;
  // and we give video output via buffer pointer (void*)out
  uint32_t *dst = (uint32_t*)out;
  // this example here does just a copy of input to output
  memcpy(dst, src, geo.size);
}
  
frei0r::construct<MyExample>
        plugin("MyExample", "short and simple description for my example",
               "Who did it", 1, 0);