media-pp

media-pp is a small, GStreamer-flavored media pipeline library for Rust, built on ffmpeg-next. Stages are synchronous calls by default, and thread boundaries are explicit bounded queues.

What it does

• Errors come back as Result. A stage's failure returns straight up the call stack; only past a Queue does it become a bus event.
• Running pipelines change shape. Branches are added and finished while buffers flow, and filters are swapped without reopening the source.
• GPU-resident end to end on D3D11, D3D12, CUDA, Vulkan or VideoToolbox and Metal: decode, scale, composite, key and encode without copying pictures back to the CPU. VideoDecodeBin and VideoEncodeBin pick the hardware where it opens and fall back to software where it does not.
• Capture of screens, windows, cameras and audio on Windows, Linux and macOS; output to files, HLS, RTMP and RTSP servers, and WebRTC.
• Playback control: seek, pause, step, speed and reverse, with a preroll that shows the picture sought to before playing on. Player plays a file with its sound in a window in a dozen lines.

Every element, by what it does and which backend it runs on, is in docs/elements.md.

Getting it

[dependencies]
media-pp = "0.3"

FFmpeg 8.0 or newer development libraries and Rust 1.88 or newer are needed; the library has no default features, and each backend, capture and output is one — see docs/features.md. A first pipeline and a first Player are in docs/getting-started.md.

How a pipeline runs is the crate documentation's first page, on docs.rs for the backend-independent and Linux API, and in the Windows API documentation and the macOS API documentation for everything on those platforms.

Building

The library crate lives in lib/; each directory below examples/ is a crate of its own:

cargo run -p player -- path/to/video.mp4

Setting up FFmpeg and each platform's SDKs is in docs/building, and testing in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Documentation

Getting started	Adding the crate, a file's pipeline, playing a file, where to read on
Elements	Every element, by what it does and by backend
Features	Every feature flag, its platform, and what it needs to build
Examples	The example crates and how to run them
Building	Setting up Windows, Linux and macOS to build and test
Vision benchmarks	How fast detection, tracking and classification run, against what the GPU can do
Stream events	Design record of how segments, flushes and the end of a stream travel
CHANGELOG.md	What changed between versions, and what to write instead
CONTRIBUTING.md	Testing, the control conformance matrix, soak tests

AGENTS.md holds the repository's design and review rules, for people and coding agents alike.

License

Licensed under either the Apache License, Version 2.0 or the MIT License, at your option.

media-pp does not bundle FFmpeg. Users are responsible for complying with the license of their FFmpeg build and optional codecs.