Gavl is short for Gmerlin Audio Video Library. It is a low level
library, upon which multimedia APIs can be built. Gavl handles all
the details of audio and video formats like colorspaces, samplerates,
multichannel configurations etc. It provides standardized definitions
for those formats as well as container structures for carrying audio
samples or video images inside an application.

In addition, it handles the sometimes ugly task to convert between
all these formats and provides some elementary operations (copying,
scaling, alpha blending etc)