Multimedia News Archives

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

Google engineers on Wednesday released AOM-AV1 3.5 as the newest version of their open-source AV1 video encoder. With AOM-AV1 3.5 comes yet more performance improvements as well as memory optimizations.

Along with the Linux kernel preparing for its initial Rust integration, Rusticl landing in Mesa this week as the first major Rust usage within Mesa, and Cloudflare announcing an Nginx HTTP proxy replacement written in Rust, some additional Rust adoption news for the week is that the GStreamer project is now ready to ship Rust-written plug-ins as part of their official binary releases.

FLAC 1.4 was released on Friday as the "Free Lossless Audio Codec" that is known for its great, no-cost lossless compression for digital audio.

For the open-source software popular for screen-casting and videogame live-streaming, OBS Studio 28.0 was released today as a big feature update.

Intel has contributed support for their oneVPL open-source video processing library to the upstream FFmpeg project for that widely-used, cross-platform multimedia library.

IPFS as the "InterPlanetary File-System" protocol for peer-to-peer network support in decentralized file sharing as a distributed file-system is now supported with FFmpeg 5.1. IPFS developers at Protocol Labs are also looking at expanding support for this protocol to other open-source projects.

With the Linux 6.0 multimedia subsystem changes, the H.265/HEVC user-space API is now being considered stable.

Takashi Iwai of SUSE as the Linux sound subsystem maintainer has submitted all the new hardware support and feature updates targeting the Linux 6.0 merge window. The Linux 6.0 sound driver changes are notable when it comes to new AMD and Intel hardware support among other changes.

Earlier this year Intel released SVT-AV1 1.0 as a big update to this leading open-source AV1 video encoder. Since then they have not let up and now three months after v1.1, SVT-AV1 1.2 is now shipped as the latest update to this cross-platform, high performance AV1 encoder.

FFmpeg 5.1 "Riemann" was released on Friday afternoon as a new feature update to this widely-used, open-source multimedia project for video encode/decode and a variety of other purposes.

The Hantro VPU driver that has been developed the past several years for supporting the Hantro video/image processing IP found on various Rockchip and NXP SoCs is set to be promoted out of the Linux kernel's staging area.

The RkVDEC driver that is mainlined in the Linux kernel for supporting accelerated video decoding on select Rockchip SoCs has so far been focused on H.264 and VP9 video codec support. With a new patch series out on Wednesday, HEVC/H.265 acceleration is being ironed out.

Back in 2018 Intel announced Sound Open Firmware (SOF) as their push for open-source sound firmware and looking to drive new software innovations in the audio DSP space. Out this week is Sound Open Firmware 2.2 for providing the newest features for this open-source software stack supporting Windows and Linux.

Google engineers on Friday released AOM AV1 v3.4 as the newest version of this open-source AV1 CPU-based video encoder.

While PipeWire continues gaining traction for fulfilling the audio management roles long handled by PulseAudio, the PulseAudio project itself continues progressing and successfully evolving its mature code-base. Out this weekend is PulseAudio 16.0.

The media subsystem updates have landed this week for the ongoing Linux 5.19 merge window for this collection of video encode/decode drivers.

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library this morning merged AVIF muxing support for this image format based on the AV1 royalty-free video codec technology.

The Alliance for Open Media already has a public repository serving as the reference software implementation for "AVM" as the AOM Video Model as the next-generation codec from this alliance responsible for the excellent AV1.

The widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has merged support for the JPEG-XL image format.

MediaTek this week posted their initial "request for comments" code on stateless AV1 decoder support for their video codec driver.

Part of the mainline kernel has been Tegra-VDE as an originally reverse-engineered NVIDIA Tegra video decode driver. After much work on that driver by developer Dmitry Osipenko, it's been promoted out of "staging" with Linux 5.18 among other media subsystem changes.

The sound subsystem updates were sent in last week for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window. There is a lot of new audio hardware enablement and other improvements to find with this sound pull for the new kernel.

WirePlumber is the increasingly used session/policy manager for PipeWire for audio/video streams on the Linux desktop. Out this weekend is WirePlumber 0.4.9 with some important fixes and improvements.

The much anticipated dav1d 1.0 open-source AV1 video decoder has been released! Dav1d 1.0 is a big update to this leading CPU-based AV1 decoder that now offers AVX-512 support for newer Intel CPUs, threading enhancements, and more.

After not seeing a new release for nearly three years, MPlayer 1.5 was released this past weekend for this open-source media player.

Dav1d as the leading CPU-based, open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN project is nearing its v1.0 release.

The MythTV open-source digital video recorder (DVR) software isn't nearly as popular as it was a decade ago considering all of the Internet streaming services these days, but the developers behind it continue pushing forward this open-source DVR solution. Out today is MythTV 32.0 as the first major release in nearly two years.

Intel has released libva 2.14 as the newest version of this VA-API (Video Acceleration API) driver-agnostic library. Notably with libva 2.14 is adding an AV1 encode interface for upcoming GPUs having hardware-accelerated AV1 encode.

Google in cooperation with AOMedia this week released the AOM-AV1 v3.3 encoder for this royalty-free video codec.

Long before the likes of VA-API and VDPAU for GPU video playback acceleration on Linux, there was X-Video and X-Video Motion Compensation (XvMC). Finally in 2022 the widely-used FFmpeg multimedia library has decided to drop that XvMC hardware acceleration code.

PipeWire 0.3.45 is out today as the newest update to this audio/video stream server that is becoming increasingly common on the Linux desktop.

The first release candidate of GStreamer 1.20 is now available for testing of this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches.

FFmpeg 5.0 has now been formally christened as for what is aiming to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source multimedia library.

A new version of JACK2 is available this weekend, the latest version of this cross-platform, professional sound server.

FFmpeg 5.0 is out today as a shiny feature update to this widely-used open-source audio/video handling suite.

Among many other sound driver changes destined for the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle, Cirrus Logic has contributed CS35L41 HD audio codec support in the form of a new sound driver, cs35l41_hda.

While not nearly as featureful as say OpenShot or Kdenlive, Avidemux is an open-source video editor that is simple to use and has been around for a long time. Avidemux 2.8 is now available as the latest feature release.

Prominent FFmpeg developer Cyanreg has begun working on an experimental Vulkan hardware acceleration video decoder for FFmpeg.

Released this week was Rav1e 0.5 as the newest feature release for this Rust-written AV1 video encoder backed by Xiph.Org and self-proclaimed to be the world's "fastest and safest" AV1 encoder.

MPV 0.34 is now available as the newest version of this popular Linux video player that is powered by FFmpeg and forked originally from MPlayer/mplayer2 code.

Libaom 3.2 is now available as the latest version of the official AOMedia/Google-developed AV1 Codec Library. With libaom 3.2 comes compression efficiency improvements, perceptual quality improvements, and a variety of speed-ups and memory optimizations.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE is back to hacking on SALSA, the "small ALSA" library that he started a decade ago but hadn't seen a new release in six years or any code activity for the past four years... until this week.

The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver.

Released at the start of August was dav1d 0.9.1 for this high performance CPU-based AV1 open-source video decoder while now another point release is available with yet more optimizations.

The sound/audio drivers have landed for the ongoing Linux 5.15 kernel driver.

OpenShot 2.6 has been released as the newest version of this non-linear open-source video editing system for Linux.

Ardour as one of the leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) solutions is out with another new release.

Cirrus Logic has contributed a number of improvements to their CS8409 HDA audio driver for the Linux kernel that includes support for new "Dolphin" audio hardware.