Multimedia News Archives

For just over a decade the Lightworks high-end, cross-platform video editing software has been owned by EditShare after it was acquired from Gee Broadcast. Now though LWKS Software Ltd has been established and acquired this video editing software from EditShare.

It should come as little surprise in general but making use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) for multimedia encode/decode is a big deal for performance. While one could hope that by 2020 most open-source encoders were already extensively utilizing AVX(2), that isn't yet the case with the latest being AOM-AV1 picking up another optimization.

Along with Intel's SVT-AV1 0.8.5, another open-source AV1 video encoder seeing a new release this week is the Rust-written rav1e.

GStreamer 1.18 is now available for this widely-used, cross-platform multimedia framework.

While AV1 adoption is still taking off and finally seeing desktop hardware with AV1 decode, given the time it takes to develop a new high-end video codec it shouldn't come as too much surprise that "AV2" is already being explored.

GStreamer 1.18 is gearing up for release in the very near future while for right now a release candidate is available for testing this widely-used open-source multimedia framework.

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) today announced the formation of a Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG) to bring AV1 video support to more platforms by leveraging Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 implementation.

Version 20.08 of Kdenlive has been released, the KDE-aligned open-source non-linear video editor platform that is among the best in the field for open-source, community-driven projects.

NihAV is a new open-source, multimedia framework being pursued by FFmpeg/Libav developer Kostya Shishkov.

Kodi 19 "Matrix" Alpha 1 has been released for this very popular, cross-platform open-source HTPC software.

The latest FFmpeg multimedia library code can see faster H.265 video encoding with the Video Acceleration API when running on Icelake and newer Intel graphics.

When it comes to open-source audio software, the Ardour digital audio workstation and Audacity audio editor are the two flagship offerings. But Zrythm continues advancing as another promising open-source digital audio workstation project. Zrythm is currently in a late alpha stage with its newest release this weekend but a beta appears to be on the horizon.

Way back in 2010 it was announced that Lightworks would be going open-source as this high-end, non-linear and cross-platform video editor solution. This video editing system has been used by many films over the years from The Wolf of Wall Street to Bruce Almighty to Moulin Rouge to Pulp Fiction as well as many other movies and television shows while also being approachable enough that it's used by less advanced video editing enthusiasts. Lightworks going open-source would be a big win, but ten years after their failed plans were announced they finally have shed some light on why such move away from being a proprietary application never materialized.

PTGui as one of the leading panorama photo stitching software programs on Windows and macOS has finally been ported to Linux.

For those trying to carry out AV1 video decoding on a 32-bit Arm environment, the new dav1d 0.7.1 decoder should be a heck of a lot faster.

If the VideoLAN project wasn't already busy enough developing the VLC media player, dav1d AV1 decoder, libbluray, x264 and numerous other open-source multimedia projects, libndi is a new library being developed for dealing with NDI (Network Device Interface) video streams.

FFmpeg 4.3 is out as the latest version of this key open-source multimedia library. FFmpeg 4.3 is quite a big release.

Entangle 3.0 has been released as the newest feature update to this software for controlling your DSLR camera under Linux with tethered shooting capabilities.

While not the long-awaited GIMP 3.0, GIMP 2.10.20 is out today as the newest stable release for this open-source image editor alternative to the likes of the proprietary Photoshop software.

The Linux 5.8 media subsystem changes restore a previously dropped driver for supporting the cameras found on multiple generations of Intel Atom devices.

Ardour 6.0 is now available as the latest major release of this high-end yet open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) package that runs across all major platforms.

This week marked the release of the dav1d 0.7 AV1 video decoder with more performance optimizations thanks to more hand-tuned Assembly and other tweaking of this leading CPU-based AV1 video decoder. Here are benchmarks compared to the prior dav1d 0.5 and 0.6 releases.

The VideoLAN team responsible for the dav1d AV1 video decoder have just released dav1d 0.7 as the newest feature release and it comes with more performance optimizations.

Version 2.0 of the libaom AOMedia AV1 video encoder / video codec SDK library is now available as the first major update in nearly two years.

Since the release of Rav1e v0.3.1 back in February the "weekly pre-releases" dropped off until this week with there finally being a new tagged milestone.

Just weeks after the first Ardour 6.0 pre-release, the release candidate is now available for this big digital audio workstation software update.

The media subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

Following two and a half years of development, the first pre-release of the forthcoming Ardour 6.0 digital audio workstation is now available for testing.

For those stuck in home isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic, MythTV 31 has been released for any open-source DVR and HTPC needs.

For longtime Linux users who were fans of the XMMS audio player in the early 2000's, Audacious 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this XMMS-inspired audio player.

Any regular Phoronix reader should already be quite familiar with SVT-AV1 and the other open-source Scalable Video Technology encoders considering how much we have been benchmarking them -- months before even before they were officially announced. Netflix, which has been working on SVT-AV1 in conjunction with Intel, has an interesting write-up for some weekend reading on the state of this open-source AV1 encoder/decoder.

Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far.

Dav1d 0.6 is now available as a big update to this open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN crew.

Released last month was the big OpenShot 2.5 release that brought hardware acceleration for video encode/decode via VA-API and NVENC/NVDEC, SVG vector graphics support, Blender 2.8+ integration support, import/export to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, and much more. Out now is OpenShot 2.5.1 with a few more improvements sprinkled on top.

The first release candidate of OBS Studio 25.0 is now available for this cross-platform open-source software popular with game streamers.

In addition to PipeWire 0.3 having shipped last week, also making it out a few days prior was a development snapshot in the road to PulseAudio 14.0.

It was not even two full weeks ago that Rav1e 0.3 was released with speed optimizations and other AV1 encoding enhancements while released on Tuesday was Rav1e 0.3.1 with a change to boost encode speeds at lower levels.

Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds.

Out this Sunday is OpenShot 2.5 as the non-linear video editor's biggest release yet for this cross-platform, open-source solution.

As we've been expected, Rav1e 0.3 is now out the door for this open-source Rust-based AV1 encoder that now runs faster at higher encode levels.

Rav1e v0.2 brought 40~70% speed improvements over its previous release for this Rustlang-based AV1 video encoder but the upcoming Rav1e 0.3 will be even faster.

While the standard is now two decades old and has yet to unseat the JPEG image standard in popularity, there is renewed interest in JPEG2000 with High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) and finally seeing increased software support. Collabora's Aaron Boxer thinks that JPEG2000 could finally be going mainstream.

Lightworks 2020.1 is on the way as this professional-grade video editing system's first release of the year and a change in their versioning scheme. Out this week is the first public beta of the still-proprietary video editing system for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The Linux 5.6 media driver updates have landed in the kernel.

MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer.

Ahead of the forthcoming dav1d 0.6 release, this open-source AV1 video decoder has begun implementing AVX-512 optimizations targeting Intel Ice Lake processors.

Xiph.org's Rustlang-written "Rav1e" AV1 video encoder is back on track with delivering weekly pre-releases after missing them over the past month due to the holidays. With Rav1e p20200115 are not only performance improvements but also binary side and build speed enhancements.

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver.

MPV, the open-source cross-platform media player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2 long ago, is out with a new feature release before closing out 2019.

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year.