Chapter 1. Python and Multimedia

Since its conception in 1989, Python has gained increasing popularity as a general purpose programming language. It is a high-level, object-oriented language with a comprehensive standard library. The language features such as automatic memory management and easy readability have attracted the attention of a wide range of developer communities. Typically, one can develop complex applications in Python very quickly compared to some other languages. It is used in several open source as well as commercial scientific modeling and visualization software packages. It has already gained popularity in industries such as animation and game development studios, where the focus is on multimedia application development. This book is all about multimedia processing using Python.

In this introductory chapter, we shall:

• Learn about multimedia and multimedia processing

• Discuss a few popular multimedia frameworks for multimedia processing using Python

• Develop a simple interactive application using PyGame

So let's get on with it.