The MPEG-7 library is a free and open source set of C++ classes, implementing the MPEG-7 standard (ISO/IEC 15938:2001 and 15938:2004).

With MPEG-7 developers are able to create multimedia content descriptions, manipulate them, serialize them to XML and de-serialize them – with validation – from XML.

MPEG-7 is available as source release and as binaries for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. One major design goal was to simplify extending single classes to allow the developer to enrich interface functionality for certain descriptors.

Furthermore documentation on concept and source code level improves the learning curve for the programmer.

MPEG-7 contains data structures for representing, accessing, and modifying descriptors and description schemes and provides tools for parsing, serializing descriptions. MPEG-7 does not contain feature extractors.

Here are some key features of "MPEG-7 Library":

· Support for Part 3, 4 and 5 of the MPEG-7 (version 1, 2001 and version 2, 2004) standard (about 1200 classes)
· Serializes the whole tree or parts of it
· Serializes to string, console output or file
· Access of nodes with XPath statements
· Creates sub-trees from XPath statements
· Extension mechanism
· Browseable HTML documentation
· Schema validation and namespace checking (at parsing time)
· Patterns (e.g. MediaTimePoint and Duration) are extracted to numbers - no inefficient and time consuming string processing necessary
· Works with UNICODE and standard character encodings (ISO Latin-1, UTF-8, UTF-16)
· Class functionality can be added at runtime (late binding)
· Extension mechanism is very easy to use
· Handles 'Conformance under extension' described in MPEG-7 standard (Part 7)
· Cross-platform: available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
· Future proof - automatic code generation allows fast library update when future MPEG-7 versions are released
· Locking mechanism and update notifications if nodes are changed

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· The main changes are 64bit support for all platforms and the upgrade to Xerces 3.1.1. In addition several bugs have been fixed.