Vivid Protocol

Vivid is a secure, terminal-attached media protocol for displaying images and video and playing audio inside a terminal. It keeps bulk media off the terminal PTY, so ordinary terminal text stays separate from media transport.

The protocol has two roles: a producer creates media sources and supplies their data, while a presenter owns the terminal window, authenticates producers, decodes media, manages placement, and renders or plays the result. A private endpoint and per-window capability token protect each session. Control connections handle capability negotiation, scene state, playback, flow control, visibility, and recovery; source-specific media connections carry raster, image, video, or audio data. The PTY carries only normal terminal output and a bounded authenticated text-anchor marker that can bind media placement to a semantic terminal position. Local transports and SSH forwarding allow the same model to work for both local and remote producers.

vivid_protocol is the shared, renderer-independent Rust wire implementation used by Vivi, Vivido, conformance tools, and protocol tracers.

The crate provides:

• directional connection limits, ordered record framing, endpoint parsing, and the 64 MiB ceiling;
• deterministic, bounded CBOR and typed control-message schemas;
• raw/zstd RGBA raster, straight or premultiplied alpha, and PNG/JPEG image bodies;
• portable H.264/HEVC/VP9/AV1 video and MP3/AAC/ALAC/PCM audio access units, including media sequence and trim metadata validation;
• authenticated text anchors using base64url and HMAC-SHA256.

cargo add vivid_protocol

use vivid_protocol::wire::{ConnectionKind, Preface, encode_preface};

let bytes = encode_preface(ConnectionKind::Control, 1024 * 1024);
let preface = Preface::decode(bytes)?;
assert_eq!(preface.kind, ConnectionKind::Control);
# Ok::<(), std::io::Error>(())

Public modules:

• wire — prefaces, records, directional limits, sequencing, and transports;
• cbor — deterministic encoding and strict bounded decoding;
• messages — the Vivid registry and control schemas;
• media — raster, image, portable-video, and portable-audio binary contracts;
• anchor — token decoding, session-key derivation, and text-anchor authentication.

License

Licensed under Apache-2.0.