Media Lovin' Toolkit is an open source

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 multimedia framework

Multimedia framework

A multimedia framework is a software framework that handles media on a computer and through a network. A good multimedia framework offers an intuitive API and a modular architecture to easily add support for new audio, video and container formats and transmission protocols...

, designed and developed for television broadcasting. It provides a toolkit for broadcasters, video editors, media players, transcoders, web streamers and many more types of applications. The functionality of the system is provided via an assortment of ready to use tools, XML authoring components, and an extensible plug-in based API.

By providing a common set of utilities in a single library, it enables developers to easily create video editors as used by Kdenlive

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an open source video editing software package based on the MLT Framework that focuses on flexibility and ease of use...

 and OpenShot. This enables effort to be pooled around a single library for developing this complex piece of software.

Technical overview

MLT provides a lean API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 with minimal dependencies (POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

 and C99

C99

C99 is a modern dialect of the C programming language. It extends the previous version with new linguistic and library features, and helps implementations make better use of available computer hardware and compiler technology.-History:...

). The design is modular allowing for the addition of new components and making integration simple with other multimedia libraries and applications. Support is available for the authoring and manipulation of time-based media including playlist

Playlist

In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. They can be played in sequential or shuffled order. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of radio broadcasting and personal computers.-In radio:...

s, multiple tracks

Multitrack recording

Multitrack recording is a method of sound recording that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources to create a cohesive whole...

, filters, and transitions using DOM

Document Object Model

The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML and XML documents. Aspects of the DOM may be addressed and manipulated within the syntax of the programming language in use...

High-level

High-level programming language

A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or be from the specification of the program, making the process of...

 language binding

Language binding

In computing, a binding from a programming language to a library or OS service is an API providing that service in the language.Many software libraries are written in systems programming languages such as C or C++...

s exist for C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, Lua, Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

, PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

, Ruby

Ruby (programming language)

Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...

, and Tcl

Tcl

Tcl is a scripting language created by John Ousterhout. Originally "born out of frustration", according to the author, with programmers devising their own languages intended to be embedded into applications, Tcl gained acceptance on its own...

MLT has a modular design that supports multiple libraries like FFmpeg

FFmpeg

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...

 and Jack

JACK Audio Connection Kit

JACK is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time, low latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that implement its API...

. Through FFmpeg, MLT is able to support nearly all audio and video formats with optimized operations. A comprehensive suite of video and audio effects including image scaling, alpha-compositing, deinterlacing, masking, motion-tracking, audio mixing, audio gain, and wipe transitions.

• A selection of output targets/profiles including HD
• An XML
  XML
  Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
  
   authoring schema
  XML schema
  An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself...
  
   designed to leverage the full capabilities of the system
• YAML
  YAML
  YAML is a human-readable data serialization format that takes concepts from programming languages such as C, Perl, and Python, and ideas from XML and the data format of electronic mail . YAML was first proposed by Clark Evans in 2001, who designed it together with Ingy döt Net and Oren Ben-Kiki...
  
  -based metadata and schema for documentation of modules, their services, and parameters
• Live IP streaming
  Streaming media
  Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
  
   output via FFmpeg
• Command line progamme: melt

Protocol

• Comprehensive Client–server protocol and API for playout scheduling
• MVCP, based upon work in dv1394d and designed based upon SGI MVCP