Flavor: A Language for Media Representation

TL;DR

Flavor is a formal language extending C++ and Java to describe multimedia bitstreams, enabling automatic code generation for reading and writing compressed media data, simplifying access for developers.

Contribution

This paper introduces the latest version of Flavor, a formal language with an automatic code generator for multimedia bitstream manipulation, now available as open source.

Findings

Flavor allows describing both in-memory and bitstream representations in one language.

The translator generates C++ or Java code for direct multimedia data access.

Open source release facilitates widespread adoption and use.

Abstract

Flavor (Formal Language for Audio-Visual Object Representation) has been created as a language for describing coded multimedia bitstreams in a formal way so that the code for reading and writing bitstreams can be automatically generated. It is an extension of C++ and Java, in which the typing system incorporates bitstream representation semantics. This allows describing in a single place both the in-memory representation of data as well as their bitstream-level (compressed) representation. Flavor also comes with a translator that automatically generates standard C++ or Java code from the Flavor source code so that direct access to compressed multimedia information by application developers can be achieved with essentially zero programming. Flavor has gone through many enhancements and this paper fully describes the latest version of the language and the translator. The software has been made into an open source project as of Version 4.1, and the latest downloadable Flavor package is available at http://flavor.sourceforge.net.