text: abstract
  flavor (formal language for audio-visual object representation) has been created as a language
  for describing coded multimedia bitstreams in a formal way so that the code for reading and writing
  bitstreams can be automatically generated. it is an extension of c++ and java, in which the typing
  system incorporates bitstream representation semantics. this allows describing in a single place both
  the in-memory representation of data as well as their bitstream-level (compressed) representation.
  flavor also comes with a translator that automatically generates standard c++ or java code from
  the flavor source code so that direct access to compressed multimedia information by application
  developers can be achieved with essentially zero programming. flavor has gone through many enhancements and this paper fully describes the latest version of the language and the translator. the
  software has been made into an open source project as of version 4.1, and the latest downloadable
  flavor package is available at http://flavor.sourceforge.net.