PROfessional MEdia toolKIt

A modern C++20 library for building professional audio, video, and media applications.

Status: Work in Progress — libpromeki is under active development. The core APIs, pro A/V subsystems, and networking stack are functional and in daily use, but interfaces may change without notice. Bug reports and feedback are welcome.

libpromeki provides the foundational building blocks that professional media software needs: timecode, frame rates, image and audio descriptors, pixel formats, color science, networking, memory management, signal/slot event systems, and more. It is designed so that you can focus on your application logic instead of reinventing infrastructure.

API Documentation

Guides

In-depth topic guides, browsable directly on GitHub or as part of the hosted Doxygen output:

• Building and Installing libpromeki
• Debugging and Diagnostics
• Threading and Concurrency
• Data Object Categories
• TypeRegistry Pattern
• Color Science
• Color Space Conversion (CSC) Framework
• Font Rendering
• Media I/O Subsystem
• MediaPipeline
• MediaPipelinePlanner
• Inspector — Frame validation and monitoring
• Image Data Encoder Wire Format
• NVIDIA NVENC setup
• Demonstration Applications
• Utility Applications

Feature Overview

Core Library

General-purpose C++ infrastructure that the rest of the library is built on.

• Strings — encoding-aware strings with copy-on-write semantics
• Containers — List, Map, Set, HashMap, Deque, Queue, Stack, PriorityQueue, Array
• Smart pointers & memory — SharedPtr, Buffer (reference-counted memory blocks), MemPool, BufferPool, SecureMem
• I/O & serialization — DataStream (binary), TextStream, AnsiStream (ANSI terminal), and a family of I/O devices (File, BufferedIODevice, BufferIODevice, StringIODevice)
• File system — File, Dir, FileInfo, FilePath, plus a compiled-in resource filesystem (CIRF) for embedding assets
• Concurrency — Thread (with built-in event loop), Mutex, ReadWriteLock, WaitCondition, Atomic, Future/Promise, ThreadPool, Strand
• Event system — Qt-style ObjectBase with parent/child hierarchy, Signal/Slot connections (including cross-thread dispatch), EventLoop, timers
• Time & date — DateTime, Timestamp, Duration, ElapsedTimer
• JSON — JsonObject / JsonArray via nlohmann/json
• Hashing — MD5, SHA-1, FNV-1a
• Utilities — UUID, FourCC, Enum (reflection), Random, CommandLineParser, Logger, Process, Benchmark, VariantDatabase, ConfigOption, Histogram
• Math & geometry — Matrix, Point, Size2D, Rect, Line, Rational

Professional Audio / Video

Classes for working with professional media formats, images, audio, color science, and timecode.

Descriptors & formats:

• ImageDesc — image dimensions, planes, and pixel layout
• AudioDesc — sample type, rate, and channel layout
• MediaDesc — combined frame rate, image layers, audio groups, and metadata for a complete media stream
• PixelFormat / PixelDesc — extensive pixel format registry with 78 pixel formats and 132 pixel descriptors covering interleaved, planar, and semi-planar layouts (RGB, YCbCr, Bayer, DPX-packed, and more)

Image processing:

• Image — raster image container with multi-plane support
• Image file I/O for PNG, JPEG, Cineon (CIN), DPX, PNM, SGI, TGA, and raw YUV
• JPEG XS encode/decode (via SVT-JPEG-XS, x86-64)
• PaintEngine — software rasterization for interleaved and planar pixel formats
• Font / FastFont — FreeType-based font rendering with glyph caching and alpha compositing

Audio processing:

• Audio / AudioBuffer — audio sample containers
• AudioFile — audio file I/O (WAV, AIFF, OGG via libsndfile)
• AudioGen — signal generators (sine, square, sawtooth, noise, etc.)
• AudioLevel — level measurement
• AudioTestPattern — standard test audio patterns
• LtcEncoder / LtcDecoder — Linear Timecode (LTC) encode and decode on audio streams

Color science:

• Color — color values with multiple color model support
• ColorModel — color model descriptors (sRGB, Rec. 709, Rec. 2020, DCI-P3, CIE XYZ, and more)
• Color space conversion pipeline with SIMD acceleration via the Highway library: transfer function, matrix, chroma, alpha, pack/unpack stages

Timecode:

• Timecode — SMPTE and non-standard timecode (backed by libvtc)
• TimecodeGenerator — frame-accurate timecode generation
• FrameRate — frame rate descriptors with drop-frame support

Video & frames:

• Frame — unified image + audio + metadata at a single timestamp
• VideoTestPattern — color bars, grids, ramps, and other standard test patterns
• ImgSeq — image sequence handling with frame range and naming patterns
• Metadata — typed key-value metadata container

Media I/O framework:

An extensible pipeline for reading, writing, and transforming media, built around MediaIO (registry/factory) and MediaIOTask backends:

• TPG — test pattern generator (video and audio)
• ImageFile — image file and image sequence I/O
• AudioFile — audio file I/O
• QuickTime — MOV/MP4 read and write
• RTP — network streaming via RTP/SDP
• Converter — pixel format and color space conversion
• Custom backends are registered with PROMEKI_REGISTER_MEDIAIO()

Pipeline orchestration:

High-level classes that wire a DAG of MediaIO stages from a declarative configuration:

• MediaPipelineConfig — shareable description of stages + routes + metadata; validates the DAG, round-trips through JSON and DataStream, and saves/loads as JSON preset files
• MediaPipeline — instantiates the stages, drives signal-based frame flow on the caller's EventLoop, handles fan-out and back-pressure, exposes a build / open / start / stop / close lifecycle
• MediaPipelineStats — per-stage MediaIOStats map plus a pipeline- layer PipelineStats bucket (frames produced, write retries, errors, back-pressure, uptime); round-trips through JSON and DataStream

Networking

BSD-socket abstractions and real-time media transport protocols.

• Sockets — TcpSocket, TcpServer, UdpSocket, RawSocket, PrioritySocket, LoopbackTransport
• Addresses — SocketAddress, NetworkAddress, IPv4Address, IPv6Address, MacAddress
• RTP/SDP — RtpSession, RtpPacket, RtpPayload (RFC 3550); SdpSession, SdpMediaDescription
• Transport — PacketTransport, UdpSocketTransport, MulticastManager, MulticastReceiver

Music & MIDI

• MidiNote / MidiNoteNames — MIDI note representation and lookup
• MusicalNote — note with frequency and pitch
• MusicalScale — scale descriptors (major, minor, modes, custom)
• NoteSequenceParser — parse note strings (e.g. "C4 D4 E4 C5")

Terminal UI (promeki-tui)

An optional shared library providing a terminal widget toolkit.

• Application & rendering — TuiSubsystem, TuiScreen, TuiPainter, TuiPalette
• Widgets — Label, LineEdit, TextArea, Button, CheckBox, ProgressBar, ListView, Frame, ScrollArea, Splitter, TabWidget, StatusBar, Menu
• Input — keyboard and mouse event parsing

SDL Graphics (promeki-sdl)

An optional shared library for SDL3-based applications (off by default).

• SdlSubsystem, SDLWindow, SDLVideoWidget, SDLAudioOutput
• SDLPlayer — MediaIO-backed player with video display and audio output

Library Architecture

libpromeki is organized into one main shared library and two optional UI libraries:

promeki — the core library. Networking, pro A/V, music, and other feature areas can be independently enabled or disabled via CMake feature flags.

promeki-tui — terminal UI widget library (optional).

promeki-sdl — SDL3-based GUI library (optional, off by default).

No Dependency Hell

All third-party libraries that promeki depends on are vendored as git submodules, built as static libraries with -fPIC, and absorbed directly into libpromeki.so. Alternatively, each dependency can be switched to use system-installed versions via PROMEKI_USE_SYSTEM_* CMake options.

When you install libpromeki, you get a shared library and a set of headers. Your application links against promeki::promeki — no chasing down system packages, no version mismatches, no transitive dependency surprises.

Vendored dependencies: zlib-ng, libspng, libjpeg-turbo, FreeType, libsndfile, nlohmann/json, libvtc, SVT-JPEG-XS, Highway, CIRF.

Included Utilities

Program	Description
promeki-info	Print library build information (version, date, build type)
mediaplay	CLI media player and pipeline builder with --in/--out/--converter stages; pass --memstats to dump per-MemSpace allocation counters at exit
promeki-bench	Unified benchmark driver (CSC pair matrix now, other suites land here over time); writes JSON for baseline tracking and prints a delta table against a previous run
imgtest	Image file I/O test utility

Building

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/jthwho/libpromeki.git
cd libpromeki
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

For the complete build, install, and downstream-integration guide — including every CMake feature flag, vendored-vs-system dependency switch, build-performance option, test and install targets, and consumer CMake usage — see the Building and Installing libpromeki guide:

• Markdown source: docs/building.md
• Hosted Doxygen: https://jthwho.github.io/libpromeki/main/building.html
• Local Doxygen: build/doxygen/html/building.html after cmake -B build -DPROMEKI_BUILD_DOCS=ON && cmake --build build --target docs

Debugging

If you build the library in Debug mode (-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug), the promekiDebug() logging function is enabled. Each source file that wants to use it must register a debug channel:

PROMEKI_DEBUG(MyChannel)

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

Then enable channels at runtime via the PROMEKI_DEBUG environment variable (comma-separated):

export PROMEKI_DEBUG=MyChannel,AnotherChannel
./yourapp

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. --jth

License

libpromeki is licensed under the MIT License.

Third-party library licenses and attribution notices are documented in THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.