= Livido =

Official website: [http://livido.dyne.org http://livido.dyne.org]

== Abstract ==

During the last couple of years we have been observing a blooming development in the field of realtime video software for the Linux/GNU platform.
An increasing number of artists and other users are exploring the possibilities of several unique software packages for video editing, mixing and effect processing.

The question arises here how we (the developers) balance the growing number of features against complexity, (re)usability and manageability of large
r scale software design.

As users, we choose our applications because their features fit our purposes , as developers we serve the needs of the users who want an increasing number of features added to our applications while we should focus on flexible core engines and program frameworks.

An elegant solution to this problem is to provide the Free Software community with a flexible architecture that allows a shared pool of video plugins. This brings a number of benefits: we can give designers of plugins the opportunity to develop their (video) processing algorithms without the distraction of resolving interface problems.

== History ==

The original initiave for LiViDO evolved from the Piksel workshop held by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Art (BEC) in november 2003 (Bergen, Norway).This workshop focussed on artists and developers working with Free Software for realtime processing of video and sound.

Since 2003 Livido has been in more or less active development ; In the first
year no consensus was reached (Livido was forked multiple times by various authors) and it was more or less dead by the end of the year.

On the 15th of january, an attempt was made to revive Livido by providing an implementation of flexible (generic) datastructures in C ([wiki:VeVo vevo]). Altough the package was a rough implementation , its basic concept found acceptance by other livido developers;  

Since June 2005, a small group of developers have been working on a joint specification of Livido (Denis Rojo , Gabriel Finch and Niels Elburg) to provide a general information model of Livido.

In the week of 16 to 23 October 2005, this specification was presented as a working draft at Piksel. A commitee was formed and a maintainer (Daniel Fischer) was appointed (to reduce the rate of change). During the piksel-week, the specification was revamped and simplified.

Now, livido 1.0 is in its last stage of development - See the current candidate specification at [http://livido.dyne.org/trac.cgi/wiki/TechnicalSpecCurrent the official website].


== People ==

(in no apparent order)

* Gabriel "Salsaman" Finch
* Niels Elburg
* Dennis "Jaromil" Rojo
* Daniel Fischer
* Martin Bayer
* Kentaro Fukuchi
* Andraz Tori