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Pro Media Kit Library
A C++ library for professional audio/video/media
Modified:
Created:
Tags: Programming, C++, Spectsoft, Promeki

I’ve started to collect all my C++ code that pertains to professional audio/video/media into a singular library called libpromeki. It takes its name from the internal library that performed the same functions at my, now defunct video disk recorder company, SpectSoft . In fact, much of this library comes from that earlier library, although the earlier library sat atop Qt and this newer library has all the Qt dependency removed (although keeps a lot of the same design patterns). You can find the library here

History

The bulk of the code that makes up libpromeki started out life as code that existed across multiple libraries originally developed by my (now defunct) company, SpectSoft , for our video disk recorder product called RaveHD. During its run, it was used in post production, vfx, animation, and other media related sectors. At that time, the entire application stack was built on top of the Qt framework. The Qt design patterns, aesthetic, and general way of doing things has certainly informed much of how this library was architected.

What you see now is a library that takes the good bits from that old code base and has removed the Qt coupling and replaced it with modern C++ native STL. Hopefully you’ll find it as useful as I have over the years.

Dependencies

  1. C++20

  2. C++ filesystem library

  3. (optional) libpng - Used to read/write PNG files
    http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

  4. (optional) libsndfile - Used to read/write wav, aiff, ogg soundfiles.
    http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/

  5. (optional) libfreetype - Used to draw fonts on image surfaces.
    https://freetype.org/

Building

The library uses cmake for building, so building for your platform should be as easy as executing the following from within the root of the source tree:

  1. mkdir build
  2. cd build
  3. cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
  4. And then running the generated build system (e.g. make, ninja, xcode, visual studio, etc)

Use Tips

Here’s some tips on how to best utilize the library in your application:

  1. Add the /path/to/promeki_codebase/include to your compiler’s include path
  2. Use the #include <promeki/header.h> method to include any promeki files
  3. Everything in promeki is in the promeki namespace. Often you can get away with using the entire namespace with:
c++ 
using namespace promeki;

Documentation

You can build the API documentation by using the docs target in your cmake generated build. So, for example, if you’ve generated a make based build system, you should be able to type make docs and doxygen will be run to generate the docs. NOTE: This target will only exist if you’ve got doxygen installed (and cmake can find it).

Additionally, you can find a copy of the documentation here: API Documentation

Debugging

If you build the library with PROMEKI_DEBUG_ENABLE defined, this will enable the promekiDebug() function to write debug information to the log. Each source file that wants to use promekiDebug() must also call PROMEKI_DEBUG(<DEBUG_NAME>) at the top of the source file. This creates a debug channel by this name and assigns this source scope to this debug channel. You can then use the PROMEKI_DEBUG environment variable to enable debug output of certain debug channels. You can provide a comma separated list for debugging multiple channels at once. So, for example:

In your source file:

c++ 
PROMEKI_DEBUG(MyChannel)

// elsewhere in your code
promekiDebug("This is a debug log entry")

And then when running your application:

sh 
export PROMEKI_DEBUG=MyChannel
./yourapp

And the promeki log output will now have all debug messages from the MyChannel debug channel.