Introduction

Mediaway is a Rust media stack for encode, decode, mux/demux, and device capture (camera, mic, screen) — built as high-level pipelines composed from first-class low-level surfaces, not a monolith that hides them.

Three ideas run through the whole stack:

• Zero-Copy paths. Video moves through GPU handles (GpuBufferHandle) or shared CPU buffers wherever the platform allows it. When a copy, upload, or readback is unavoidable, the API names it — never a silent slow default.
• Sans-IO cores. Muxers, demuxers, and bitstream/timebase logic are pure state machines: you push bytes or packets in, poll bytes or packets out. No file handles or sockets inside the core, so the same logic runs unchanged on native hosts and in WASM.
• Low-level APIs stay public. VideoEncoder, VideoDecoder, Muxer, Demuxer, and friends are the real surface. mediaway’s EncodeSession and platform::Auto* helpers are convenience wrappers over them, not a gate you have to go around.

Is Mediaway ready for my project?

Not for production yet. Mediaway is early development (0.x), pre-1.0: public APIs, crate layout, and backend behavior can change without a deprecation cycle. See Status & Stability for what that means concretely and when to reconsider.

It’s a good fit today for experimentation, integration spikes that can tolerate breakage, and contributing to a platform still taking shape.

Where to go next

• New to the crates? Start with Installation and Quick Start.
• Want a worked example for a specific task? See Guides.
• Need to know exactly what’s implemented on your platform/codec/GPU combo? See Reference — those tables are pulled directly from the project README, so they stay in sync automatically.

Design rationale beyond what this book covers lives in the repository’s docs/spec/ — this book is the user-facing guide, docs/spec/ is the engineering SSOT.