libavg 0.6.0 review

libavg library is made for media presentations and installations that is meant to make Macromedia Director superflous. Installatio

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 1681K Developer: libavg Team

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libavg library is made for media presentations and installations that is meant to make Macromedia Director superflous.

Installations are scripted using an XML-based layout language and Python for interaction.

Multimedia on linux has made great progress. A few years ago, video support was very limited, low-latency-audio was impossible and getting jitter-free performance was a nightmare. This has changed, and all that's really missing is some glue that joins the different libraries. libavg is an effort to do for multimedia installations what the Gimp did for image editing, what OpenOffice did for word processing... and what Linux did for operating systems in general: give people an alternative that's free (as in speech, not beer).

Presumably, companies will be using avg too, but the main effort will be to support artists and designers that don't have the resources to buy commercial software. Of course, that means that the system needs to run well on old computers, while allowing the use of all features on modern pcs.

It should be almost as easy to build installations as it is to build a web page. Designing interactive systems will still need some programming skills, but this should be kept to a minimum. A avg installation consists of one or more xml files that describe screen layout(s) and corresponding python scripts that describe the dynamics of the installation: What to do when a user interacts with the system, some time has elapsed or any other input has arrived. The result is that the xml files are as easy to edit as html is - and many of the methods used for the interactive parts should be very familiar to anyone who's used javascript on a web page.

What's New in This Release:
In addition to many minor improvements, this version adds support for dynamically adding nodes to and removing nodes from an active avg tree, thus making the library a lot more flexible.