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SDL – Simple Directmedia Layer

The Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform framework for fast access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffers. SDL is supported on a wide variety of OS's and platforms (Linux, Win32, MacOS, Solaris etc.).

SDL is used in games, media-playback applications (MPEG, MP3 etc.), desktop utilities and other applications. SDL is written in C but has bindings for most popular languages (Java, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Lua etc.).

Here are some of the categories of SDL APIs:

• Low level video management
  
• Window management
  
• Events
  
• Joystick
  
• Audio
  
• CD-ROM
  
• Multi-threaded Programming
  
• Time functions
  
• Files
  
• Image format functions
  
• Networking
  
• Displaying Rich Text Format (RTF) files
  
• TrueType font rendering
  
• OpenGL
  
  

Some well known applications using SDL are:

Bochs – a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator
Mplayer - an MPEG player supporting DivX/VCD/DVD/MPEG1/MPEG2
Wings 3D - a 3D modeling application
“Civilization: Call To Powerâ€? - game

Visit the SDL website for more information

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