A small change in the GPAC versioning scheme

Release

Hi there,

We changed our versioning policy. After releasing a version (e.g. 2.0), we used to immediately create a new version followed by the ‘-DEV suffix’ (e.g. 2.1-DEV). Then when an official release happened we would remove the suffix (e.g. 2.1).

This seems to have created useless discussion on the timeline of GPAC installers and versions: was 2.1-DEV anterior (yes) or posterior (no) to the official 2.1 release?

To mitigate that issue, we have decided that odd minor versions (e.g. 2.1-DEV) would be dedicated to our development rolling-releases. These versions are tested using our CI but they might occasionally break until we detect and fix the issue, usually thanks to you. These breakage are unfortunately unavoidable, and that’s the precise reason we need a community and a robust test suite and CI/CD system.

Even versions (e.g. 2.0 or 2.2) are stable releases.

As a consequence our next release will be 2.2. That should be soon… stay tuned!

GPAC 2.0

Release

We are happy to announce the release GPAC 2.0, packed with new features!

This release brings support for Python and NodeJS: you can now interact with GPAC media pipelines using these languages, from basic session processing down to packet-level manipulations.

A new JSON-based video editor called avmix has landed in GPAC: it is designed for typical live processing tasks (scheduling, animations and transitions, graphics/text insertion) running from command line with or without GPU.

A lot of work has been put on HLS support for both client and packager, with support for low latency HLS.

MP4Box has been improved as well and is now capable of in-place rewrite, resulting in much faster IOs when editing files.

As usual, installers are available on gpac.io for most common platforms.

Enjoy, give us feedback and spread the news!

Continue reading GPAC 2.0 →

ISOBMFF, the technology at the heart of GPAC, awarded a Technology Engineering Emmy®

News,

Today, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced that it decided to honor the File Format subgroup under MPEG for the ISOBMFF technology.

We, the GPAC contributors and community, are proud to have been part of the development of this awarded technology from its beginning. GPAC started more than 20 years ago to demonstrate the features of the MPEG-4 Standard which includes ISOBMFF. Soon, GPAC’s MP4Box became the MP4 swiss-army knife used worldwide by MP4 aficionados, by multimedia researchers and by media companies in production.

In GPAC, we always strive to be amongst the first tools to implement the new ISOBMFF features. Movie fragments (required for adaptive streaming), Common Encryption, the Image file format (IFFs such as HEIF or AVIF), … the support of the GPAC open-source tooling and community proved crucial to create correct and effective standards.

In 20 years we made hundreds of contributions to the awarded MPEG File format Subgroup (and still counting!). We hope to continue to offer that level of innovation and commitment to you for the next 20 years. In 2020 we released GPAC 1.0 (filters) to make sure we’re technically on track for the future.

We would like to congratulate all contributors to this technology and thank our user base for feature requests and bug reports which helped us contribute and improve the ISOBMFF technology and our support of it.

GPAC 1.0.0 public release

Release

After almost 20 years of development, GPAC reaches yet another milestone. As the major number increment suggests, this GPAC version offers significant changes over previous releases.

Among the video community GPAC was known for its wide capabilities. Unfortunately these capabilities came with maintenance and usability challenges. This new version addresses these challenges by leveraging a new modular system called “filters”.

Filters make GPAC easier to use thanks to a unified API. Filters make GPAC easier to test, document, and maintain. Filters make GPAC more efficient thanks to a highly configurable resource manager. Filters make GPAC 1.0 the best GPAC ever. The multimedia ecosystem is very innovative and so is GPAC, now ready for the next 20 years!

This release comes with many new features thanks to the rearchitecture.

A special focus was made to make the transition as transparent as possible for our users. The APIs and the tool (MP4Box, MP4Client, …) are fully compatible to make the transition as smooth as possible.

For the last year we have maintained both the legacy and the new versions with both new features and bug fixes. From now on, the legacy version is marked LTS and will only receive bug fixes.

As usual pre-built installers are available for simplicity.

We strongly encourage users to update their codebase.

Of course there is still much to be done. Please help us and get in contact using our issue tracker.

We’d like to thank our community for the warm welcome of all these changes. You have been so patient and supportive during this transition period. Thank you.