There hasn't been a new FFmpeg release since last November but that finally changed with FFmpeg 4.2 "Ada" being issued today as the newest major release for this multimedia open-source project.

Linux sound maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has posted a set of patches implementing HD audio component notifier support for the Radeon and Nouveau DRM kernel drivers.

After going through 9+ rounds of revisions for the Amlogic video decode driver, it's now been part of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel.

For fans of the Kodi project for providing the flagship open-source HTPC experience, Kodi 18.3 is out today as the newest maintenance update.

It's been a year since the release of PulseAudio 12 and even eleven months since the last point release but it looks like the next PulseAudio release will be out very soon.

It was nearly a decade ago the high-end, commercial video software editing solution Lightworks announced they would be going open-source but to this day that milestone has yet to be materialized. Lightworks though does continue advancing with their v14.6 release on the horizon and at least their added Linux support continues to be expanded upon.

Going back to last year we've been watching the progress of an open-source Amlogic video decode driver for the likes of the Amlogic GXBB/GXL/GXM chipsets. That driver has yet to be mainlined but is now up to its ninth round of public review.

While we have been reporting on and benchmarking the Intel SVT video encoders since February, they were only officially announced last month and this Sunday marks their first tagged release for the AV1 encoder in the form of SVT-AV1 0.5.0.

Veteran Linux multimedia developer Paul Kocialkowski summed up the current situation this week of many hardware platforms having a general purpose micro-controller running a non-free firmware blob for coordinating the video decoding work. It makes it easier to program with this firmware-based approach but makes the driver less free and now with recent Linux infrastructure improvements could better support dealing with the video hardware itself.

Mauro Carvalho Chehab sent in the media subsystem updates on Wednesday for the Linux 5.2 kernel and that new work has already been merged to mainline.

Intel's Clear Linux operating system wasn't their only open-source project seeing various performance improvements over the course of April but it turns out their Scalable Video Technology AV1 (SVT-AV1) video encoder also saw a nice performance improvement at the end of April.

Version 0.3 of the "dav1d" AV1 video decoder was released on Tuesday and it delivers faster performance.

For fans of the Kodi HTPC software, version 18.2 of the "Leia" update is now available with several prominent fixes.

The GStreamer 1.16 cycle is slowly coming to an end and today marks the availability of the release candidate for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework.

While the crowd-funding campaign has long been used up for working on the Allwinner VPU support via reverse-engineering for the mainline Linux kernel, Bootlin continues advancing the "Cedrus" driver particularly in getting the H.264 decoding to work.

The recently open-sourced Intel video encoders for VP9, AV1, and HEVC under the "Streaming Video Technology" (SVT) umbrella continue looking very positive especially for the newer VP9/AV1 video formats.

The 19.04 release of Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu flavor focused on multimedia production / content creation, might not happen unless at least one of their developers are granted package upload rights.

The DAV1D open-source AV1 video decoder is now much more capable on older PCs and ARM mobile devices with its second release.

With there being a lot of interest from when Intel recently open-sourced their SVT-AV1 video encoder and more recently their VP9 video encoder also under the "Scalable Video Technologies" umbrella, here are benchmarks from 27 different systems showing off their performance. Plus for kicks there are also some other CPU-based video encode benchmarks including AOM-AV1 and others.

For those still trying to find a suitable non-linear open-source Linux video editing solution that fits your needs, Flowblade 2.0 is now available for this decade old video editor that is arguably not as well known as the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Flowblade 2.0 comes with the largest workflow and user experience improvements since the early days of the project.

It was nearly one year ago to the day that there was the huge VLC 3.0 feature release and while that was a great update to this open-source, cross-platform media player there is a lot more out on the horizon.

Kodi 18.0 "Leia" is now available as one of the biggest releases ever for this open-source, cross-platform multimedia/HTPC software.

Patches were posted on Monday wiring up support for the Allwinner H6 SoC within the Cedrus VPU driver for open-source video decode support.

It's been a while since last having anything major to report on MythTV, the once very common HTPC software for open-source DVR/PVR needs albeit less so these days given all the Internet streaming and on-demand video platforms. This month the project released MythTV 30.0 as their newest feature release.

GStreamer 1.15.1 was announced on Friday as the first development release in the trek towards GStreamer 1.16 for this powerful open-source multimedia framework.

Kodi 18 Leia RC5 is available this weekend as what should be the last release candidate before this major release is out of this widely-used, cross-platform HTPC software.

VLC 3.0.6 was released on Thursday while VideoLAN developers were at CES in Las Vegas celebrating the milestone of their cross-platform multimedia software surpassing three billion total downloads.

Should you not be familiar with it already, PulseEffects is a program that provides an equalizer and other effects controls for Linux systems running on PulseAudio.

If you have some downtime during the holidays and looking to setup a Linux HTPC/multimedia system, the first beta of LibreELEC 9.0 is now available as the lightweight Linux distribution built around the Kodi HTPC media playback software that also has picked up Retroplayer gaming support and other recent features.

The media subsystem is seeing a lot of work going into the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel cycle. Two pull requests of media feature work have already been sent in for this imminent merge window.