Intel engineers that maintain the common VA-API library "libva" today released version 2.21 with several fixes and additions for this Video Acceleration API support.
Multimedia News Archives
611 Multimedia open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
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.
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai with SUSE has submitted all of the core sound updates and driver changes for the ongoing Linux 6.9 kernel merge window.
Building off last November's release of the big OBS Studio 30.0 release, OBS Studio 30.1 debuted today as the newest feature release.
GStreamer 1.24 is out today as a major enhancement to this open-source multimedia framework.
Xiph.Org's Opus open-source audio format for lossy audio coding has rolled out Opus 1.5 as a big update that is now making greater use of machine learning.
Better late than never, merged yesterday into the FFmpeg Git codebase is a DVD-Video demuxer.
The WavPack open-source lossless wavefile compressor is up to version 5.7 after more than one year in development. Making this new release quite notable is adding multi-threaded encode and decode support to the WavPack library and its CLI tools.
Daniel Almeida with Collabora has posted a rewritten of the VP9 codec library code within the Linux kernel's Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) subsystem. In using Rust rather than the existing C code, this should yield better memory safety and better fend off potential issues within the existing code.
Ardour 8.4 was released this week as the newest update to this open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) for Linux / macOS / Windows platforms.
Fraunhofer on Tuesday released their latest feature update to the Versatile Video Encoder for open-source H.266/VVC encoding.
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.
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.
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.
Following the release of OBS Studio 30.0 last November, OBS Studio 30.1 Beta 1 was released today as what will be the next feature release for this open-source software that is popular with livestreamers and other game streaming / desktop recording purposes.
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.
Sent in last week were all of the media driver updates for Linux 6.8. Arguably most notable is the introduction of the StarFive Camera Subsystem driver as a new image sensor processor driver initially being treated as a staging driver.
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.
While the Linux 6.8 merge window isn't opening for another week, the Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have already been mailed in to Linus Torvalds for this next merge window.
Picked up this week by the Linux sound subsystem's "next" development branch is a number of additions to the Scarlett USB audio mixer driver for supporting this audio hardware under Linux.
The Xiph.Org project Rav1e to provide the fastest and safest AV1 encoder by leveraging the Rust programming language is ending out 2023 with a new feature release.
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.
Yesterday the initial code for supporting the Alliance For Open Media's Immersive Audio Model and Formats (IAMF) was merged for the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library.
Shotcut 23.12 debuted this weekend as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editing solution for Linux, Windows, and macOS systems.
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.
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.
Flowblade 2.12 is now available as this multi-track, non-linear video editor for Linux systems. Shotcut as another open-source video editor also recently put out a new version too.
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.
Embedded Linux consulting firm Bootlin has announced they've developed open-source Linux kernel driver support for the H.264 video encoder found with Allwinner V3, V3s, and S3 SoCs.
OBS Studio 30.0 was released as stable this evening as the latest version of this cross-platform software that is popular for screen-casting and widely-used by game streamers.
While it was supposed to ship back in H1'2023, FFmpeg 6.1 finally released last night as the newest feature update to this widely-used multimedia library.
After more than two years of work, a patch series was posted this weekend for a "fully functional" ffmpeg multi-threaded command-line application with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines being wired up.
The Linux 6.7 sound subsystem changes submitted this week by maintainer Takashi Iwai include support for a number of new audio devices/platforms.
Linux sound patches queued for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.7 cycle are preparing for the upcoming introduction of the new "Xe" DRM kernel graphics driver.
In addition to the recent PreSonus Studio One 6.5 debut for Linux, the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation software this week released its big "8.0" milestone.
Libva 2.20 was released today as the newest update to this common Video Acceleration API (VA-API) library that sits in front of the various hardware-specific VA-API driver implementations.
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.
Dav1d 1.3 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this widely-used, open-source AV1 video decoder.
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.
Sound Open Firmware 2.7 released overnight and adds AMD Van Gogh platform support, presumably to be used by the Valve Steam Deck or some future refresh of the device or related platform like for VR hardware.
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.
Following the releases this week of Intel's SVT-AV1 1.7 encoder and the libavif 1.0 AV1 Image File Format release, Google engineers are out with libaom 3.7 as the newest feature release to that AV1 encode library.
The first beta release of the forthcoming OBS Studio 30 screencasting software is now available for testing.
MPV 0.36 is out today as the newest version of this open-source media player that was originally forked from the MPlayer/mplayer2 code and leveraging the FFmpeg library.
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.
Libva 2.19 has been released as the newest feature update for this centralized library used by the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux and other platforms.
The Linux 6.5 media subsystem updates were merged this week for the merge window that is wrapping up this weekend.
The sound subsystem updates were sent in today for the in-development Linux 6.5 kernel merge window.
SVT-AV1 1.6 is now available as the latest version for this leading CPU-based AV1 encoder that is now enjoying 30~40% faster performance with high quality presets.
Last month I wrote about the virtual ALSA driver being developed for the Linux kernel. That driver has now morphed into the Virtual PCM Test driver and is on its way with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.
611 Multimedia news articles published on Phoronix.