Welcome to the OpenShot Video Editing Library (libopenshot) C++ API. This library was developed to make high-quality video editing and animation solutions freely available to the world. With a focus on stability, performance, and ease-of-use, we believe libopenshot is the best cross-platform, open-source video editing library in the world. This library powers OpenShot Video Editor (version 2.0+), the highest rated video editor available on Linux (and soon Windows & Mac). It could also power your next video editing project!

Our documentation is quite extensive, including descriptions and examples of almost every class, method, and parameter. Getting started is easy.

All you need is a single include to get started:

#include "OpenShot.h"

The Basics

To understand libopenshot, we must first learn about the basic building blocks:.

Readers - A reader is used to read a video, audio, image file, or stream and return openshot::Frame objects.
- A few common readers are openshot::FFmpegReader, openshot::TextReader, openshot::ImageReader, openshot::ChunkReader, and openshot::FrameMapper
Writers - A writer consumes openshot::Frame objects, and is used to write / create a video, audio, image file, or stream.
- A few common writers are openshot::FFmpegWriter, openshot::ImageWriter, and openshot::ChunkWriter
Timeline - A timeline allows many openshot::Clip objects to be trimmed, arranged, and layered together.
- The openshot::Timeline is a special kind of reader, built from openshot::Clip objects (each clip containing a reader)
Keyframe - A Keyframe is used to change values of properties over time on the timeline (curve-based animation).
- The openshot::Keyframe, openshot::Point, and openshot::Coordinate are used to animate properties on the timeline.

Example Code

Now that you understand the basic building blocks of libopenshot, lets take a look at a simple example, where we use a reader to access frames of a video file.

// Create a reader for a video
FFmpegReader r("MyAwesomeVideo.webm");
r.Open(); // Open the reader
 
// Get frame number 1 from the video
std::shared_ptr<Frame> f = r.GetFrame(1);
 
// Now that we have an openshot::Frame object, lets have some fun!
f->Display(); // Display the frame on the screen
f->DisplayWaveform(); // Display the audio waveform as an image
f->Play(); // Play the audio through your speaker
 
// Close the reader
r.Close();

A Closer Look at the Timeline

The following graphic displays a timeline, and how clips can be arranged, scaled, and layered together. It also demonstrates how the viewport can be scaled smaller than the canvas, which can be used to zoom and pan around the canvas (i.e. pan & scan).

Build Instructions

Build instructions are available for all three major Operating Systems:

Want to Learn More?

To continue learning about libopenshot, take a look at the full list of classes available.

License & Copyright

Copyright (c) 2008-2021 OpenShot Studios, LLC http://www.openshotstudios.com/. This file is part of OpenShot Library (libopenshot), an open-source project dedicated to delivering high quality video editing and animation solutions to the world. For more information visit http://www.openshot.org/.

OpenShot Library (libopenshot) is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

OpenShot Library (libopenshot) is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with OpenShot Library. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.