A new release of PipeWire was made on Tuesday for this audio/video stream management solution for Linux that can replace the likes of JACK and PulseAudio.

Linux 5.14 has re-landed support for improvements to lower the latency of its USB audio driver.

Linux 5.14 is ready to begin supporting some new sound hardware while some recently proposed USB audio latency improvements were rejected for now.

PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio.

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel.

With the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, the USB sound driver will ideally exhibit lower latency when starting playback.

PipeWire continues to be on an upward trajectory for managing Linux audio/video streams and becoming a viable replacement now to PulseAudio and JACK on the Linux desktop.

With the new dav1d 0.9 AV1 decoder release bringing AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth videos, the performance improvements are very pronounced with modern Intel and AMD systems.

As written about a few days ago, the open-source Dav1d AV1 decoder has added AVX2 Assembly for higher bit depth decoding. Dav1d 0.9 is now available with this optimization and more.

For those interested in the story of PipeWire for handling Linux audio/video needs not only for the Linux desktop itself but coming to cars / infotainment systems and more, there is an interesting Red Hat interview going over the history and other topics pertaining to PipeWire.

For those making use of 10-bit AV1 content and using dav1d as the performant CPU-based decoder, the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors is about to be a heck of a lot better.

This week happened to see new releases of two prominent open-source AV1 video encoders.

MuSE is a MIDI and audio sequencer with audio recording and editing support. MuSE supports plug-ins to form a complete digital audio workstation. This GPL-licensed audio software is now up to version 4.0 and with it comes a redesigned user-interface.

Just ahead of the Fedora Workstation 34 release where it will be the first major Linux distribution using PipeWire as a modern alternative to PulseAudio and JACK, PipeWire 0.3.26 is now available as the newest big feature release for this audio/video stream server for the modern Linux desktop.

FFmpeg 4.4 is out today as a large update to this widely-used multimedia library and with it comes many new features including new demuxers, AV1 support improvements, and other enhancements.

Back in February we covered Google's work on the Lyra voice/audio codec designed for fitting with very low bit-rate audio for speech compression in use-cases like WebRTC and video chatting even on the most limited Internet connections. Thanks to leveraging machine learning, Lyra can function at just 3kbps. The code to Lyra is now public.

While PipeWire is being increasingly looked at by desktop Linux distributions as the future of audio/video stream handling on the Linux desktop, aside from Fedora most Linux distributions are so far being cautious in replacing PulseAudio. In any event, PulseAudio is showing no signs of letting up and continues seeing new feature development.

For those making use of OBS Studio for screen capturing or streaming from your desktop, the OBS Studio 27.0 release is on the way and it's a big one.

Intel's VA-API library (libVA) is out with a new end-of-quarter release for this open-source Linux video acceleration interface.

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder.

Google has released libaom 3.0.0-rc1 as the AOMedia AV1 Codec Library.

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor.

Zrythm 1.0.0-alpha.12.0.1 released this week as the interesting open-source, GTK-based digital audio workstation that has been moving closer to a 1.0 release.

Released yesterday was dav1d 0.8.2 as a fairly significant update to this AV1 CPU-based decoder. For those wondering what this update means for performance, here are some initial benchmarks.

Dav1d is already the most performant and leading AV1 software decoder we have seen while out today is v0.8.2 that should speed-up the video decode process even more on modern x86/x86_64 and ARM hardware.

With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server.

The sound subsystem changes were submitted on Friday by maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel.

Kodi 19.0 "Matrix" is now available for this popular open-source, cross-platform HTPC solution.

A new developer feature coming to the Linux 5.12 kernel thanks to a Canonical developer is software audio jack injection support.

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.