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).