This is GStreamer, a framework for streaming media. The fundamental design comes from the video pipeline at Oregon Graduate Institute, as well as some ideas from DirectMedia. It's based on plug-ins that will provide the various codec and other functionality. The interface hopefully is generic enough for various companies (ahem, Apple) to release binary codecs for Linux, until such time as they get a clue and release the source. Developer note: When building from CVS sources, you will need to run autogen.sh to generate the build system files. GStreamer is cutting-edge stuff. To be a CVS developer, you need cutting-edge tools. ATM, most of us have at least these versions : * autoconf 2.52 (NOT 2.52d) * automake 1.5 * libtool 1.4 * pkg-config 0.8.0 autogen.sh will check for these versions and complain if you don't have them. Check autogen.sh options by running autogen.sh --help autogen.sh can pass on arguments to configure - you just need to separate them from autogen.sh with -- between the two. prefix has been added to autogen.sh but will be passed on to configure because some build scripts like that.