Piksel is an annual event for artists and developers working with open source audiovisual software. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, performing, holding workshops and discussing the aesthetics and politics of open source and free culture.One of the results of the past Piksel events was the initiation of Piksel Technologies, a framework of tools and libraries that aims to provide interoperability between various free software applications dealing with video manipulation techniques.
The current focuses of the project are implementing a library for plugin dynamically loaded video processors and colorspace transformations; developing a standard set of control commands for interoperability between media applications; and providing a library implementation that can be easily embedded into other software.

The following are the first bits of code that have been released: Livido - a free video plugin api for realtime and NLE applications; Livido documentation and download; Frei0r - a minimalistic plugin API for realtime video effects; Frei0r specification; VideoJack - a mechanism to route video signals between applications running on the same computer.The other parts are discussed under the interoperability and video piping issues on the piksel wiki, as well as on the piksel-dev mailing list. This project has its origins at the Piksel meeting held at BEK, during which authors from various free software applications met to settle common specifications:
EffecTV, FreeJ, LiVES, MøB, PD/PDP, PiDiP, VeeJay, GePhex, Open Movie Editor.

www.piksel.no