Cross-Platform Media Framework
Chameleo is a cross-platform multimedia framework to create visually-rich video applications with interactive widgets. Creating a multimedia application for desktops is still not an easy job because current media frameworks such as GStreamer and DirectShow do not provide high-level APIs. Chameleo abstracts those low-level building blocks and removes accidental complexities of building media applications.
Python, GTK+, GStreamer, Cairo, Freetype. More Flexible.
Chameleo provides GTK+ like object-oriented APIs to create multimedia application in a flexible way. The power of Chameleo comes from the ability to leverage existing open source libraries such as GStreamer, GTK+, FreeType, Cairo, and Pango. It is based upon proven open source technologies to shorten learning curve and provides language bindings for other languages such as Python..
ZUI, Zooming User Interface
Chameleo uses OpenGL or DirectX for rendering, loads textures from SVG and generates images using Cairo. Therefore, Chameleo can provide rich visual effects, support ZUI (Zooming User Interface) from its beginning and open up new possibilities of multimedia user interface to desktop application developers. With ZUI, users can change the scale of the viewed area in to see more detail or less. Basically, it emulates an infinite virtual desktop.
Extensibility
The primary focus of Chameleo is on extensibility, so it adopts the plug-in architecture from Eclipse to make it easy to extend Chameleo. With extension points and extensions, a novice programmer can enhance all the features of Chameleo without prior knowledge of Chameleo internals. Chameleo's multimedia widget sub-system is one example of many well-defined extension points of Chameleo.
Openness
Chameleo's video widget represents a collection of small applications which run on Chameleo. A widget is a small one-function program which usually has a semi-transparent look-and-feel. It can be embedded in a multimedia application to enhance the capabilities of the application. 3rd party developers can participate in the development of Chameleo based applications and users can benefit from those community-built widgets. Chameleo widgets are similar to Yahoo widgets or Windows Vista's gadgets, but they are much more specialized to multimedia applications.






