Qt Multimedia

Qt Multimedia is an add-on module that provides a rich set of QML types and C++ classes to handle multimedia content. It contains an easy to use API for playing back audio and video files and rendering those on screen, as well as a comprehensive API for recording audio and video from the systems cameras and microphones.

The functionality of this module is divided into the following submodules:

Getting started

If you are porting from Qt 5 to Qt 6 see Changes to Qt Multimedia.

If you are new to Qt Multimedia, the QML types can be imported into an application using the following statement in your .qml file.

import QtMultimedia

If you want to use the C++ classes in your application, include the C++ definitions using the following directive:

#include <QtMultimedia>
#include <QtMultimediaWidgets>

To link against the C++ libraries, add the following to your project's CMakeLists.txt file. Substitute my_project with the name of your project.

find_package(Qt6 REQUIRED COMPONENTS Multimedia)
target_link_libraries(my_project PRIVATE Qt6::Multimedia)

Overviews and Important Topics

• Changes in Qt 6
• Multimedia Overview
• Audio Overview
• Video Overview
• Camera Overview
• Supported Media Formats

QML Types

The following table outlines some important QML types.

C++ Classes

The following table outlines some important C++ Classes

For playback QMediaPlayer, QAudioOutput and QVideoOutput contain all the required functionality. The other classes are used for capturing audio and video content, where the QMediaCaptureSession is the central class managing the whole capture/recording process.

Licenses and Attributions

The Qt Multimedia module is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company. In addition, it is available under free software licenses. Since Qt 5.6, these free software licenses are GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3, or the GNU General Public License, version 2. See Qt Licensing for further details.

Platform Notes

For most features, Qt Multimedia builds upon the multimedia framework of the underlying operating system. Therefore there are several multimedia back ends based on different technologies and APIs.

While we try to support our full API on all platforms, platform specific limitations do exist in a few places. This is due to the fact that the feature set supported by those frameworks varies, implying that some functionality might not be available on all platforms. This is especially true for the set of supported file formats and codecs, as well as advanced camera functionality.

Where limitations exist, we aim to document those in the respective classes and methods.

• macOS and iOS

Reference and Examples

• QML Types
• C++ Classes
• Examples