[Flac-dev] UCI Project Announcement

alex@foogod.com
Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:45:36 -0000

Greetings all.. I'm sending this message out here because I suspect that
some
folks involved in this project might be interested in the following.  If this
is not the case (or this is not an appropriate forum for this sort of thing) I
apologize in advance..


               Project Announcement and Call for Participation
               -----------------------------------------------

The Universal Codec Interface (UCI) Project is aiming to create a consistent,
well-designed, portable set of programming interfaces for multimedia
applications and codecs to interface to one another on unix-like (and
potentially other) operating systems.

The UCI system is intended to provide an interface which is both consistent
enough to allow easy ("plug and play") use of any codec by any
application,
while being flexible enough to allow sophisticated use of specialized codec
features by applications designed to take more thorough advantage of certain
codec implementations, or even to allow the user to control codec features of
which the application itself may not be directly aware.  It is not tied to any
particular system or set of other libraries (such as graphical environments),
and is intended to be lightweight and as efficient as possible so as not to get
in the way of application/codec builders.

We are interested in developing an interface which is well thought-out and
meets all the needs of multimedia applications and codecs, both now and in the
future.  To this end, we are inviting (and encouraging) participation by any
and all current multimedia developers or other interested parties, to provide
input and feedback on developing UCI specifications, suggest features,
contribute code, or simply keep up to date on the current state of the project.

UCI is an Open-Source, Open-Spec, Peer-Directed project.  Choice of licenses
and related issues are still somewhat under discussion.  Contributions and
feedback in this area are welcome, as well.

Everyone and anyone interested in contributing, knowledge, skills, critical
thinking, or anything else that might be useful to this project is welcome!  It
is our hope that through the participation of a range of contributors from
various backgrounds, we will build a system which is useful and effective for
everyone's needs, and will significantly simplify the development of both
platform-specific (linux, etc) and cross-platform multimedia software now and
in the future.

Those interested in the UCI project should visit the project web page at:

  http://uci.sourceforge.net/

A public UCI-Devel maillist is open to participation by everyone.  To
subscribe, point a web browser at:

  https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/uci-devel

..or simply send a subscription request to:

  uci-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net

We also have an NNTP gateway, web archives, and an IRC channel on FreeNode for
discussing UCI development.  More details can be found on the main project
page.

Some basic specifications and documentation as to the current direction of UCI
development are available from the main project page.  Please note that these
"specifications" are preliminary and subject to change based on
feedback from
the larger multimedia community.  If you see something that looks wrong,
please feel free to contribute suggestions to the UCI-Devel maillist.

Thank you all for your kind consideration,

-alex