Multimedia News Archives

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.

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.