Multimedia News Archives

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.

In addition to Apple revealing this week support is coming for the JPEG-XL image format in their Safari web browser, another step forward for this royalty-free image codec is FFmpeg now able to decode animated JPEG-XL files.

Dav1d 1.2.1 was released and while the version number may not be significant, it does have some useful performance optimizations and other tuning for this CPU-based open-source AV1 video decoder.

Last month Linux's sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai published a set of Linux driver patches for MIDI 2.0 support for the USB Audio and Raw MIDI drivers. That roughly six thousand lines of new code for the MIDI 2.0 driver coverage is now expected to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.5 cycle.

FFmpeg's next release (v6.1) will prove quite exciting with Vulkan Video support merged for decoding H.264, H.265/HEVC, and AV1 content. Plus there are more Vulkan Video features and other improvements in the next version.

Ivan Orlov this past week posted the patches for VALSA, the Virtual ALSA sound driver that aims to help Linux kernel developers in testing and fuzzing of the sound subsystem.

Nearly forty years after the MIDI digital music protocol was first introduced, in 2020 the MIDI 2.0 protocol was announced as a major overhaul for this widely used standard by musical devices. A big patch series sent out today prepares the Linux kernel sound drivers for MIDI 2.0.

Dav1d as the open-source AV1 video decoder developed as part of the VideoLAN project is out with a new minor feature release.

OBS Studio 29.1 is shipping today and it features AV1 and HEVC RTMP streaming support.

Intel's open-source engineers maintaining the SVT-AV1 software package as a high performance, cross-platform AV1 video encoder have issued a sizable update.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer and SUSE engineer Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.4 kernel merge window.

VA-API has been around for more than one decade as the most common Linux Video Acceleration API that works across multiple GPU/driver vendors. It's been Linux-focused to this point while thanks to the work of Microsoft has begun seeing support on Windows.

Opus 1.4 is available today as the first update in four years to this open-source, royalty-free versatile audio codec.

VVenC is an open-source project from the Fraunhofer Institute for providing H.266/VVC video encode/decode capabilities. Out today is VVenC 1.8 with the latest enhancements for speeding up CPU-based H.266 video coding.

Sound Open Firmware "SOF" 2.5 has been released as this open-source sound/DSP firmware initiative that was originally started by Intel but now is a Linux Foundation project and seeing hardware support from multiple vendors.

VP8 and H.264 have long been supported as part of WebRTC simulcast in the Chrome web browser while with the upcoming Chrome 113 release, VP9 and AV1 simulcast support is being enabled.

Version 2.18 of the VA-API library, libva, has been released today for this Linux Video Acceleration API library that is used by the various driver implementations.

In time for OBS Studio 29.1, the Veovera Software Organization non-profit has contributed support for AV1 and HEVC streaming via RTMP so that gamers and other creators can stream their content to the YouTube RTMP server using these newer video formats.

LibreELEC 11 is out today as the newest version of this Linux distribution that is purpose-built for an HTPC-oriented experience powered by the recent Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software.

As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai sent in the sound driver updates early for the Linux 6.3 cycle that is set to open following today's Linux 6.2 stable kernel release. Notable among the new audio hardware support is enabling Tesla's Full Self Driving "FSD" SoC support.

Yet another prominent open-source software release for Valentine's Day today is... dav1d v1.1! This leading open-source AV1 video decoder is out with its first major update in nearly one year and comes with more AVX-512 tuning as well as more work on Arm NEON optimizations.

The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder.

There is already some AVX-512 optimizations for software contained within the FFmpeg multimedia library, but there is room for greater AVX-512 usage especially now with AMD supporting this Advanced Vector Extensions expansion and the latest Intel Xeon CPUs having little associated cost now with AVX-512 use.

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of the XMMS audio player from two decades ago. For those that enjoyed XMMS back in the day, Audacious continues being updated as a modern fork of XMMS.

Google engineers on Tuesday released AOM AV1 v3.6 as the newest version of their open-source, CPU-based AV1 encoder.

Well known multimedia developer and VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented at FOSDEM 2023 this weekend on the upcoming FFmpeg 6.0 release as well as dav1d v1.1.

Even with local digital video recording from your antenna or cable being far less common these days than a decade prior, in the era of Internet streaming the open-source MythTV software continues making progress for this dominant Linux solution for HTPC/PVR needs.

Building off the release of the Kodi 20 HTPC/PVR software that released earlier this month, LibreELEC 11 Beta 1 is now available as a Linux distribution built around Kodi 20.

MPV 0.35.1 is out this weekend as the latest update to this open-source media player developed as a fork originally from MPlayer/mplayer2.

PipeWire 0.3.65 is out today as the newest feature update to this novel server for managing audio/video streams on Linux.

GStreamer 1.22 is out today as the first major release of 2023 for this open-source multimedia framework. With GStreamer 1.22 comes some exciting feature additions.

In addition to Intel engineers this past week releasing the newest Intel Media Driver quarterly release, they have also published libva 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Video Acceleration API library that is used across VA-API vendor/driver implementations.

Kodi 20 "Nexus" was released today as the latest major feature release for this widely-used HTPC/PVR software formerly known as XBMC.

OBS Studio 29.0 is out this weekend as the latest major feature release to this very popular, cross-platform software for screencasting and screen recording purposes.

While the Linux 6.1 stable kernel isn't even being released until later today, there already have been a number of feature pull requests submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel cycle. Due to the merge window being the two weeks leading up to Christmas, those with generous holiday/vacation time have been sending in their pull requests in advance. One of those early pull requests is all of the sound subsystem updates.

For those thinking about what open-source non-linear video editor to try out this holiday season for any videos, OpenShot 3.0 was officially released today as a big step forward for that project.

Yesterday marked new releases of the SVT-AV1 and Rav1e open-source AV1 video encoders.

While Sound Open Firmware 2.3 was released back in September with AMD Rembrandt and Intel Raptor Lake support, among other changes, out this weekend is a new point release to the prior v2.2 series.

OBS Studio 29 Beta 1 has been released as the newest test version for this widely-used, cross-platform open-source software for screen-casting and screen-recording purposes. OBS Studio 29 most notably is adding AV1 hardware-accelerated encoding for Intel Arc Graphics and AMD Radeon GPUs.

MPV as the popular open-source media player forked from MPlayer/mplayer2 and leveraging the FFmpeg library is out with its newest feature release.

The open-source SVT-AV1 encoder for AV1 content that is primarily developed by Intel software engineers continues getting faster and finding new ways to provide better tuned presets and yield better performance for AV1 encoding on CPUs.

While there has been more open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software solutions in recent years, Ardour that has been in development since 2005 remains one of the best professional-grade and cross-platform digital audio workstation solutions. It's now even better with today's big Ardour 7.0 release.

Intel engineers have released libva 2.16 as the newest feature update to this open-source VA-API common library used for video acceleration by many drivers and multimedia applications.

The media subsystem updates for the Linux 6.1 kernel have landed with new drivers and promotions for some of the existing image/video drivers.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai on Wednesday submitted all of the sound driver updates for Linux 6.1.