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.

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.