Multimedia News Archives


611 Multimedia open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.

Linux 6.9 Improves Speakup - Its In-Kernel Speech Synthesizer
Linux 6.9 Improves Speakup - Its In-Kernel Speech Synthesizer

The speakup driver that's long existed within the Linux kernel is a speech synthesizer that can interface with various synthesizer hardware and from user-space software can interface with /dev/synth for submitting data to the synthesizer. With Linux 6.9 the speakup driver is seeing two useful improvements.

24 March 2024 - /dev/synthu - 7 Comments
dav1d 1.4 Released With More AVX-512 Optimizations, RISC-V & LoongArch CPU Support
dav1d 1.4 Released With More AVX-512 Optimizations, RISC-V & LoongArch CPU Support

While recent graphics cards support GPU-accelerated AV1 video decoding, for those still relying on dav1d for CPU-based AV1 decode there is now version 1.4 "Road Runner" available that adds support for LoongArch and RISC-V architectures while continuing to further enhance the performance of this open-source AV1 decoder on x86_64 Intel/AMD processors too.

17 February 2024 - dav1d 1.4 - 5 Comments
MythTV 34 Released For Open-Source DVR/PVR
MythTV 34 Released For Open-Source DVR/PVR

In an era of Internet streaming digital video recorders (DVR) / personal video recorder (PVR) software isn't nearly as popular as it was in the past, but the long-used open-source MythTV software is out with its first major update in one year.

9 February 2024 - MythTV 34 - 15 Comments
Rust-Written Stateless Codec Drivers Make A Lot Of Sense
Rust-Written Stateless Codec Drivers Make A Lot Of Sense

When it comes to making use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel, one of the areas where it makes a lot of sense is for the video codec drivers given the amount of unknown/untrusted data submitted by user-space for video processing and it being a wide attack surface for bad actors. With the memory safety features of Rust this can be a big benefit to such drivers and Collabora is currently experimenting with a virtual codec driver Rust implementation to prove the concept.

6 February 2024 - Rust Codec Drivers - 31 Comments
OBS Merges FFmpeg VA-API AV1 Support
OBS Merges FFmpeg VA-API AV1 Support

The cross-platform OBS software that is popular with game streamers and others live-recording their desktops has finally landed support for AV1 video encoding using Linux's Video Acceleration API (VA-API) interface.

24 January 2024 - Video Acceleration API AV1 - 21 Comments
PulseAudio 17.0 Released With A Few New Features
PulseAudio 17.0 Released With A Few New Features

While most modern desktop Linux distributions have migrated over to PipeWire for the roles once handled by PulseAudio (and JACK, among others), for those still relying on the PulseAudio sound server the PulseAudio 17.0 release was made available today.

12 January 2024 - PulseAudio 17.0 - 36 Comments
Sound Open Firmware 2.8 Released With New Intel & AMD Bits
Sound Open Firmware 2.8 Released With New Intel & AMD Bits

A new version of Sound Open Firmware is now available for this open-source audio DSP firmware and development tools. For what began as an Intel open-source project for open-source sound firmware is now seeing ongoing adoption by AMD, MediaTek, and other vendors. Sound Open Firmware 2.8 has been released ahead of the holidays.

20 December 2023 - Sound Open Firmware 2.8 - 2 Comments
SVT-AV1 1.8 Brings More Performance Improvements Plus ARM Neon SIMD Optimizations
SVT-AV1 1.8 Brings More Performance Improvements Plus ARM Neon SIMD Optimizations

SVT-AV1 v1.8 was released this week as the newest version of this open-source AV1 video encoder originally started by Intel and continues to be developed by Intel engineers in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media. As with most releases, optimizing this CPU-based AV1 encoder's performance continues to be a key priority.

13 December 2023 - SVT-AV1 1.8 - 4 Comments
FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading As Its "Most Complex Refactoring" In Decades
FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading As Its "Most Complex Refactoring" In Decades

The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.

12 December 2023 - FFmpeg Multi-Threading - 21 Comments
FFmpeg's ffplay Media Player Adds Vulkan Renderer
FFmpeg's ffplay Media Player Adds Vulkan Renderer

The FFmpeg multimedia library has been making progress with its Vulkan Video API support while this week an interesting change was merged for ffplay, FFmpeg's built-in simple multimedia player. The ffplay player now has a built-in Vulkan renderer provided by libplacebo as an optional means of hardware acceleration.

18 November 2023 - ffplay + Vulkan - 6 Comments
PreSonus Studio One 6.5 Music Production Software Adds Wayland-Only Linux Support
PreSonus Studio One 6.5 Music Production Software Adds Wayland-Only Linux Support

At the end of September PreSonus Audio Electronics announced Studio One 6.5 as the latest version of their premium Studio One music production software / digital audio workstation (DAW). While for years Linux has had options like Ardour, Stargate, REAPER and Zrythm, for the first time the commercial Studio One has seen native Linux support.

8 October 2023 - Studio One On Linux - 42 Comments
VP8/VP9's libvpx 1.13.1 Released Due To A High Severity Vulnerability
VP8/VP9's libvpx 1.13.1 Released Due To A High Severity Vulnerability

Google on Friday released libvpx 1.13.1 as the newest update to this open-source reference encoder for the VP8 and VP9 video codecs. This release is coming due to CVE-2023-5217, which is a "high" severity vulnerability that's been exploited within at least the Google Chrome web browser.

30 September 2023 - CVE-2023-5217 - 23 Comments
Linux 6.6 Lands Support For The Cirrus Logic CS42L43 Audio Codec
Linux 6.6 Lands Support For The Cirrus Logic CS42L43 Audio Codec

In addition to the notable sound changes that merged last week for Linux 6.6 that included AMD VanGogh SOF support and enablement around a Valve "Galileo" device, sent in via the MFD pull request this week is work enabling the new Cirrus Logic CS42L43 audio codec.

7 September 2023 - Cirrus Logic CS42L43 - 5 Comments
More MIDI 2.0 Code Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel
More MIDI 2.0 Code Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel

Merged for Linux 6.5 was initial MIDI 2.0 support for the necessary USB audio and raw MIDI drivers to support this major MIDI update. Being worked on now for merging into a future kernel release is the USB gadget driver support around MIDI 2.0.

17 July 2023 - USB Gadget Driver Support - Add A Comment

611 Multimedia news articles published on Phoronix.