Multimedia News Archives

All of the media subsystem feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel were sent out overnight. Arguably most notable with the media driver changes for the new kernel is introducing the Raspberry Pi "PiSP" driver for the image signal processor (ISP) found with the Raspberry Pi 5 for powering its camera system.

For fans of OBS Studio as a popular cross-platform solution for gaming live-streamers and used for other desktop screen-casting purposes, OBS Studio 30.2 is now available as stable.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf released Dav1d 1.4.2 as the newest version of this speedy CPU-based AV1 video decoder. With this new dav1d 1.4.2 update are yet more performance optimizations for modern systems.

Flowblade 2.16 is out today as the newest version of this open-source non-linear video editor.

SVT-AV1 that started out as an open-source AV1 video encoder at Intel and more recently an an Alliance of Open Media project quietly released SVT-AV1 v2.1 last week. With this new SVT-AV1 release are yet more performance optimizations and tuning.

Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government.

There's a new release of the open-source nvidia-vaapi-driver available, the third-party VA-API implementation that in turn targets NVIDIA's NVDEC interface to allow software like Mozilla Firefox that only targets VA-API for video acceleration to work on NVIDIA GPUs.

Since going beta in 2020, the Zrythm open-source digital audio workstation software has been inching its way toward a v1.0 release. On Saturday marked the release of v1.0.0-rc.1 as a release candidate for the upcoming v1.0 release of this GTK-based digital audio workstation (DAW) software.

The widely-used, open-source FFmpeg multimedia library has seen commits this week advancing its support for Dolby Vision.

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out today with a big feature update in the form of Audacity 3.5.

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

Xiph.Org has released RNNoise 0.2 as the recurrent neural network for audio noise reduction. This library leverages a neural network model for enhancing real-time noise suppression.

The very exciting FFmpeg 7.0 multimedia library has been released! FFmpeg 7.0 rolls out most notably the new native VVC decoder that is currently experimental for supporting Versatile Video Coding as well as introducing the multi-threaded FFmpeg CLI tool.

Released this weekend is a new version of Flowblade, an open-source video editor for Linux systems. Flowblade brings some new features while the work to upgrade against the GTK4 toolkit remains ongoing and will hopefully be ready in 2025.

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.

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.