mViin

mViin is a modular, open-source software framework for real-time media processing and streaming. It is designed to enable flexible construction of processing pipelines for video, audio, and metadata and to run on Linux, Windows, macOS, and several embedded platforms.

The project was initiated in 2020 by a coalition of contributors from academia and industry. The first public release appeared in 2021, with subsequent updates introducing new plugins and a formal plugin API. It is hosted on a public repository and distributed under an open-source license compatible with industry use.

Key features of mViin include a lightweight core that handles scheduling and data flow, a plugin API for adding filters, encoders, decoders, and I/O modules, and support for multiple data formats. The framework provides language bindings for Python and C++, and supports scripting to automate pipelines. Hardware acceleration is supported through platform-specific backends such as VA-API and CUDA where available.

The architecture centers on a core engine, a plugin host, and optional components like a user-interface toolkit and scripting utilities. Pipelines are composed from modular plugins connected via data queues, with synchronization and event signaling managed by the core.

Usage of mViin spans live streaming workflows, research prototypes, and educational demonstrations of real-time media processing. It targets portability and extensibility, appealing to developers who need customizable, testable processing graphs without committing to a larger, monolithic framework.

Reception to date has been mixed but generally positive regarding flexibility and extensibility, though some critics note fragmentation across disparate plugin ecosystems. Ongoing development focuses on expanding platform support, improving documentation, and stabilizing the plugin API. See also: GStreamer, FFmpeg, OpenCV.