It's been a few months since the Kodi 18 Alpha while available today is the second alpha release of this major update to the open-source, cross-platform HTPC software.

The Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) developers working on the Cedrus open-source, reverse-engineered Allwinner video decode driver have posted their patches for enabling H.264 video decoding.

For those wondering what's been going on with the Ardour digital audio workstation cross-platform, open-source software, their developers have posted a status update about their ongoing progress to the project.

Nearly one year after the release of Opus 1.2, the Opus 1.3 release is happening quite soon with Friday marking the availability of the release candidate for this open-source and versatile audio codec implementation.

FLAC and Ogg now have faster audio encoding and decoding capabilities thanks to recent code improvements.

Libplacebo is an effort to shift the MPlayer2-forked MPV media player's core rendering code into a reusable library. The libplacebo library can allow for cleaning up MPV's APIs in the process as well as providing a standard library for GPU-accelerated video and image processing.

FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library.

Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, and others making up the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) have today announced the public draft release of the AV1 royalty-free video format!

Just a little more than one week past the GStreamer 1.14 RC1 release, the second and final release candidate of the upcoming GStreamer 1.14 is now available for testing.

Kodi, the popular HTPC software formerly known as XBMC, has put out the first alpha release of their upcoming 18 Leia milestone.

Following the big VLC 3.0 release from the beginning of February, the VideoLAN crew is ending out the month with the v3.0.1 point release.

Kodi developers have written a blog post outlining their work so far on Kodi 18 "Leia", which should be out at some point this year but with no formal release schedule yet.

As expected, the VLC 3.0 media player is now available!

The long sought after VLC 3.0 multimedia player release will be here anytime now.

GStreamer core developer Tim-Philipp Müller has provided some insight about some current and upcoming happenings for the GStreamer multimedia framework project. He also addressed the recurring comment of "write it in Rust!" for better security/safety/reliability.

Among the many interesting presentations at this year's FOSDEM event included an update on the AV1 royalty-free, open-source video codec by Mozilla/Xiph.Org's Tim Terriberry.

At this weekend's FOSDEM event in Brussels, Martijn Kaijser of the Kodi project provided an update on their current activities for 2018.

Last July marked the release of MythTV 29 as the latest release of this once super popular Linux DVR/PVR software. Today marks the availability of MythTV 29.1.

The OpenShot open-source non-linear video editor is planning for many improvements this year.

With the Christmas weekend release of the MPlayer-forked MPV Player 0.28, it's the first video player we are aware of supporting the Vulkan graphics API for video presentation. This release has just basic Vulkan support but it will be much better in the next release.

The MPlayer-forked MPV Player is out with a new feature release that presents several interesting features.

VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf has released the big VLC 3.0-RC3 update for Christmas.

VLC 3.0 is something we've been looking forward to for years and it's looking like that big multimedia player update could be released very soon.

Besides a lot of NVDEC code landing for the next FFmpeg release, there's also been a number of OpenCL improvements that were just committed to this multimedia library's codebase.

Earlier this month the FFmpeg project landed its initial NVDEC NVIDIA video decoding support after already supporting NVENC for video encoding. These new NVIDIA APIs for encode/decode are part of the company's Video Codec SDK with CUDA and is the successor to the long-used VDPAU video decoding on NVIDIA Linux boxes. That NVDEC support has continued getting into shape.

The media subsystem updates have been submitted for Linux 4.15 and continues the recent theme of HDMI CEC "Consumer Electronics Control" upbringing within the mainline kernel.

NVIDIA has been shifting their focus from VDPAU for GPU-accelerated video decoding to instead the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK that offers NVENC for encoding and NVDEC for video decoding. FFmpeg has landed initial NVDEC support.

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out with a new feature release.

For fans of the Lightworks commercial-grade non-linear video editing software, their first beta update of the 14.1 series is now available.

Taking place this weekend in Prague has been the 8th annual GStreamer Conference, which is preceding next week's Linux Foundation Embedded Linux Conference Europe.