High-level Design

High Level overview

Overall

PiTiVi is comprised of two main parts:

• The Core, containing all the project- and timeline-related components, a plugin-system and various tools.
• The User Interface, optional, offering a graphical interface to use Core

Core

Core contains several essential components, of which the most important are:

• The Application, which organizes the projects and pipelines, as well as general application settings.
• The Projects, centralizing information on editing projects, including timeline, sources used, settings, ...
• The Pipelines, allowing combining some Actions (View, Record, Stream,...) with Producers (Timeline, File, Camera, VCR, ...) and Consumers (Loudspeakers, Screen, File, Network stream,...)
• A Plugin System, allowing adding/modifying/extending features in various parts of PiTiVi.
• Some Tools, amongst which Browsers (To search/organize/discover content) and Formatters (To handle various editing projects file formats).
• Some utilities, use by various components of core, like a Discoverer (to discover the multimedia properties of contents) and Thumbnailer (To generically produce thumbnails of contents)

Application

This object represents a running instance of PiTiVi.

It contains:

• The Settings of the application, user-interface and plugins
• One or more Project(s), corresponding to the various Timelines currently opened.
• One or more Pipeline(s), corresponding to the various processing pipelines currently used.

If a User Interface is used, the Application object is its core counterpart.

Project

Represents an editing project, corresponding to ONE Timeline.

It contains:

• The Settings of the project and timeline
• The History of all events that happened on the Project and the Timeline.
• The SourceBin which are a list of the SourceFactory being used in this project. All sources used in the Timeline are present in that list, but it can also contains sources not (yet) used in the Timeline.
• The Timeline. All the timeline editing is done through this object.

Pipeline

Pipelines are where the media processing takes place. It is the grouping of three things:

• Producer(s) which are generally the contents we're using (Ex: Timeline, File, Network Stream, WebCam, DV VCR, ...)
• Consumer(s) which convert/process/display streams from the Producers (Ex: Encoding to File, Outputting to Screen/Speakers, Streaming, recording to DV VCR, ...)
• Action(s) which represent meaningful usage of the various producers and consumers (Ex: Record from Webcam, (Pre)View timeline, Render Timeline, Capture from DV VCR, ...)

Plugin System

TO BE DEFINED

Tools

Browser

Browser are a unified way of searching/browsing for contents and devices, or more generally speaking Media Assets.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Local File Browser
• Hardware Device Browser
• Effect/Operations Browser
• Media Asset Management Browser
• Online Service Browser (ex: youtube, flickr, archive.org, ...)

See Browsers for more details.

Formatter

Formatter are responsible for loading/storing Projects from/to various file formats.

Formatters can also provide subclasses of existing core objects in order to store/provide format-specific information.

See Formatter for more details.

Utilities

Discoverer

Thumbnailer

Issues still not clear

UI bundles

We need to provide some kind of mapping for which UI widget should be used for which core component, including subclasses.