Lightworks, the professional-grade video editing system that works well on Linux but has remained elusive of its long past open-source promise, is out with its first major release of 2021.

With Linux 5.11 came Pioneer DDJ-RR DJ controller support while for Linux 5.12 additional Pioneer DJ equipment will be supported.

Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second.

With last week's release of dav1d 0.8 for CPU-based AV1 video decoding we provided a number of x86_64 benchmarks while questions were raised around the ARM64 and POWER9 performance. Here are such benchmarks for those wondering about the AV1 video decoding speed on those architectures.

The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance.

Dav1d 0.8 was released this weekend (and subsequently 0.8.1 too) as the latest major release for this CPU-based AV1 decoder hosted by the VideoLAN project. Dav1d continues to be about offering the best AV1 decode speed and with the v0.8 series are even faster results -- so here are some of our initial data points as well from some weekend benchmarking.

The latest hardware enablement around Intel's Alder Lake for the Linux kernel is audio support.

Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage.

Earlier this year we covered Zrythm as an open-source digital audio workstation that is cross-platform, supports a wide variety of plug-ins, and built atop GTK3. Back then it was on the pre-1.0 version numbering while this weekend marks the release of 1.0 Alpha 6.

Over the past year we have seen various Vulkan features landing in the FFmpeg repository and this past week brought more fixes and improvements around using the Vulkan API for accelerated filters and more.

While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn't yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available.

While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0.

The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is now up to a beta state for their big version 19 "Matrix" release.

MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season.

The Linux kernel's stateless video decoder interface is used for video decoding where no state needs to be kept between processed video frames and allows for independently decoding each video frame. The H.264 stateless decode interface for the Linux kernel has been in the works for a few years and is now deemed ready and stable for dealing with modern stateless codecs.

Adding to the growing list of changes for the next FFmpeg release is now AV1 video decoding with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards.

With Intel Gen12 Xe-LP / Tiger Lake supporting AV1 accelerated decoding, Intel has provided this support via their open-source media stack on Linux that is then exposed via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Intel has now landed their patches for supporting VA-API AV1 decode with FFmpeg.

The third alpha release of Kodi 19 "Matrix" was released on Sunday for this popular multi-platform HTPC software.

JACK2 1.9.15 released on Thursday as the newest version of this professional-minded sound server focused on real-time, low-latency connections.

The media subsystem of the Linux kernel is seeing a number of changes with the in-development Linux 5.10.

New to the RTX 30 series and the NVIDIA 455 Linux driver is decode support with VDPAU for VP9 10-bit and 12-bit content, which can now be taken advantage of by the popular FFmpeg multimedia library.

Earlier this summer Intel engineers added an OpenVINO back-end to the FFmpeg multimedia framework. OpenVINO as a toolkit for optimized neural network performance on Intel hardware was added to FFmpeg for the same reasons there is TensorFlow and others also supported -- support for DNN-based video filters and other deep learning processing.

After over a half year working on this new version, Rav1e 0.4 is on the way but first is the alpha milestone out today.

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.