In this article we present the Video Analysis Platform (VAP) which is an open source software framework for video analysis, processing and description. The main goals of VAP are: to provide a multiplatform system which allows the easy implementation of video algorithms, provide structures and algorithms for the segmentation of video data in its different levels of abstraction: shots, frames, objects, regions, etc, permit the generation and comparison of MPEG7-like descriptors, and develop testing applications for shot detection, shot matching, object segmentation and tracking, etc.