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.

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.

Announced earlier this year was WirePlumber as a new session manager for PipeWire with its role in managing of audio/video streams to/from hardware/software components as well as handling security/permissions, device monitoring, and other session management functionality.

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.