The media subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

Following two and a half years of development, the first pre-release of the forthcoming Ardour 6.0 digital audio workstation is now available for testing.

For those stuck in home isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic, MythTV 31 has been released for any open-source DVR and HTPC needs.

For longtime Linux users who were fans of the XMMS audio player in the early 2000's, Audacious 4.0 has been released as the newest version of this XMMS-inspired audio player.

Any regular Phoronix reader should already be quite familiar with SVT-AV1 and the other open-source Scalable Video Technology encoders considering how much we have been benchmarking them -- months before even before they were officially announced. Netflix, which has been working on SVT-AV1 in conjunction with Intel, has an interesting write-up for some weekend reading on the state of this open-source AV1 encoder/decoder.

Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far.

Dav1d 0.6 is now available as a big update to this open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN crew.

Released last month was the big OpenShot 2.5 release that brought hardware acceleration for video encode/decode via VA-API and NVENC/NVDEC, SVG vector graphics support, Blender 2.8+ integration support, import/export to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro, and much more. Out now is OpenShot 2.5.1 with a few more improvements sprinkled on top.

The first release candidate of OBS Studio 25.0 is now available for this cross-platform open-source software popular with game streamers.

In addition to PipeWire 0.3 having shipped last week, also making it out a few days prior was a development snapshot in the road to PulseAudio 14.0.

It was not even two full weeks ago that Rav1e 0.3 was released with speed optimizations and other AV1 encoding enhancements while released on Tuesday was Rav1e 0.3.1 with a change to boost encode speeds at lower levels.

Collabora under contract with SK Telecom has been working on Hwangsaeul as a new open-source platform for relaying security system surveillance video feeds from multiple sources, recording them on the centralized server, and supports connected clients for watching the feeds.

Out this Sunday is OpenShot 2.5 as the non-linear video editor's biggest release yet for this cross-platform, open-source solution.

As we've been expected, Rav1e 0.3 is now out the door for this open-source Rust-based AV1 encoder that now runs faster at higher encode levels.

Rav1e v0.2 brought 40~70% speed improvements over its previous release for this Rustlang-based AV1 video encoder but the upcoming Rav1e 0.3 will be even faster.

While the standard is now two decades old and has yet to unseat the JPEG image standard in popularity, there is renewed interest in JPEG2000 with High Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K) and finally seeing increased software support. Collabora's Aaron Boxer thinks that JPEG2000 could finally be going mainstream.

Lightworks 2020.1 is on the way as this professional-grade video editing system's first release of the year and a change in their versioning scheme. Out this week is the first public beta of the still-proprietary video editing system for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The Linux 5.6 media driver updates have landed in the kernel.

MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer.

Ahead of the forthcoming dav1d 0.6 release, this open-source AV1 video decoder has begun implementing AVX-512 optimizations targeting Intel Ice Lake processors.

Xiph.org's Rustlang-written "Rav1e" AV1 video encoder is back on track with delivering weekly pre-releases after missing them over the past month due to the holidays. With Rav1e p20200115 are not only performance improvements but also binary side and build speed enhancements.

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver.

MPV, the open-source cross-platform media player derived from MPlayer/mplayer2 long ago, is out with a new feature release before closing out 2019.

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year.

Compared to the inaugural Rav1e 0.1 release just over one month ago, Rav1e 0.2 was released on Wednesday with 40~70% better performance depending upon the encode settings.

Rav1e's weekly-ish pre-releases for this Rust-written AV1 encoder have been focusing a lot on better performance via hand-written x86 Assembly, making use of SIMD extensions, and other fine tuning of their encoder. With this newest pre-release, another ~20% speed-up was obtained.

While lossy compression audio formats like MP3 are not recommended for use within professional audio tasks, for those using the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software as of today there is finally native MP3 import support.

The Rust-based "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues picking up performance optimizations.

Intel's SVT-AV1 video encoder for AV1 is currently the fastest AV1 CPU-based encoder we have seen but it's looking like in due time Rav1e could be closing in on it if they continue with their current trajectory.

Taking place at the end of October during the Linux Foundation events in Lyon, France was the GStreamer Conference to align with the annual developer festivities.