GPAC 2.2

We are happy to announce the release of GPAC 2.2

This release marks the end of MP4Client/Osmo4/Osmo4Ios/Osmo4Android, with gpac being used for all platforms – Android app now supports running gpac and MP4Box command line as well as running the GUI.

This release also brings better support for MKV, DolbyAtmos and DolbyVision.

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

Enjoy, give us feedback and spread the news!

Detailed changes:

Media Formats

  • 2-pass encoding for FFmpeg codecs other than libx264
  • Conversion filters for VTT, TXG3 and TTML
  • SubstationAlpha subtitle import (basic)
  • DVB subpictures in M2TS mux and demux
  • FFMPEG (mostly for Matroska) subtitle import and export (SRT/SSA to TX3G, TX3G to SRT, WebVTT and DVB subpictures)
  • EC3+Atmos signaling support
  • ALAC support
  • Improved DolbyVision muxing

Media player

  • subtitle delay and position adjustment
  • audio delay adjustment

MP4Box

  • allow numbers and media types as identifiers for track actions
  • dlba option to update atmos+ec3 signaling

Filters

  • UTC-based range extraction in reframer
  • Thumbnail generator filter
  • Added unframer filter
  • FFMPEG bitstream filters support
  • initseg support in mp4dmx filter
  • Access to GPU textures of decoders in Python and JSF bindings (glpush filter for tests)
  • Chapters editing and original timestamp dispatch in reformer range extraction
  • dual in-band and out-of-band parameter set support in dasher
  • non-blocking IO for RTSP and HTTP servers/clients
  • RTSP over HTTP in rtsp server
  • Source-Specific multicast for udp and rtp inputs
  • User Authentication for HTTP and RTSP servers
  • TLS support for RTSP client and server
  • Per-filter buffering options

Encryption

  • ClearKey support in dasher and decryption

Misc

  • QT metadata tags in MP4Box and qt muxer
  • support for some packet properties in URL templates

​Press Release: Motion Spell Deploys GPAC Open Source Software with NETFLIX

For Immediate Release, Tuesday, 8th November 2022

Motion Spell deploys GPAC Open Source Software with Netflix to build a flexible encoding and packaging platform

​GPAC Licensing – exclusively handled by Motion Spell, provides enhanced support for our industrial/commercial users. See our latest news release “Motion Spell Deploys GPAC Open Source Software with NETFLIX” 8th November 2022.

Read the press release here.

A small change in the GPAC versioning scheme

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

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®

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

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.

Towards GPAC 0.9.0

We are thrilled to announce the public release of the development branch of GPAC 0.9.0.

This branch is very special to us. It took us almost two years to re-architect GPAC to make it more powerful and easier for you to use.

GPAC takes roots in research and visionary innovations of the late 1990s. Started as a start-up in 2000, GPAC gained traction from research and a nascent multimedia community as it was open-sourced in 2003. Since then we never stopped transforming GPAC into a useful and up-to-date project, with many industrial R&D collaborations and a community of tens of thousands of users. This makes GPAC one of the few open-source multimedia projects that gathers so much diversity.

This diversity is also the result of GPAC’s two core concepts: each media is an object that lives on its own, combined by a presentation layer presenting these objects as part of an experience. This vision has proven incredibly successful in Flash and then HTML5. Although GPAC was based on MPEG-4 and SVG Tiny 1.2 technologies that never massively took off, its broad set of technologies for building rich multimedia applications (packaging, streaming, interactive playback) with limited resources makes GPAC quite unique.

After 15 years of R&D developments, the time had come to expose more of this modularity to our users, as explained here. To get details on the result of this work, go to our wiki. This work was also the opportunity to:

  • clean up unused code accumulated over the years and improve our test suite, and the test coverage on this branch is already excellent.
  • revise GPAC documentation, using auto-generation to always stay up-to-date  and move all existing documentation (post and pages of this site) to GPAC wiki.

We encourage all GPAC users to try this new version, give us feedback, feature requests and bug reports (hopefully not too many) on our issue tracker.

We will keep the master on the old architecture until end of October 2019 before switching to the new architecture. Note that the master branch is merged into the new arch branch almost daily.

Both branches are available as pre-built installers for simplicity.

The branch can be browsed online here and can be checkout as usual:

$ git checkout filters

Enjoy!

GPAC 0.8.0

GPAC has never been so alive!

We are happy to announce a new release of GPAC (v0.8.0), featuring AV1, HDR, full CENC, CMAF, HEIF and ATSC3.0 support! For more details, check the detailed changelog.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for more info on GPAC !

 

Official AV1 and VP9 support in GPAC

Dear reader,

GPAC has added support for new codecs recently:

  • AV1 support is available in nightly builds since July 10th, 2018. This include file creation with MP4Box (including MPEG DASH generation) and file playback with MP4Client. Support for AV1 encryption was added on September 20th, 2018.
  • VP9 support was completed on October 14th, 2018.

This article gives you some useful command lines to use AV1 streams, but the same can be applied for VP9 streams.

Command-line for importing AV1 streams into MP4 files

To store an AV1 bitstream into an ISOBMFF/MP4 file , use the following command line. If the input file is called *.av1, its content can be OBUs (as specified in Section 5 of the AV1 specification), IVF or Annex B bitstreams. WebM streams are not supported. You can also call OBU-based bistream *.obu and IVF files *.ivf:

MP4Box -add file.av1 file_av1.mp4

If your file extension is not recognized by MP4Box, you can indicate the bitstream format with “:fmt=obu” or :fmt=AnnexB or fmt=IVF (case insensitive) as follows:

MP4Box -add file.xxx:fmt=obu file_av1.mp4

AV1 bitstreams may not contain frame rate information, you can use the following to indicate it:

MP4Box -add file.av1:fps=1000 file_av1.mp4

Command-line for AV1 adaptive streaming preparation

You can use the usual MP4Box command line parameters to segment your AV1 MP4 file and prepare it for adaptive streaming. The following command line will generate an MPEG-DASH onDemand manifest based on an AV1 representation (with its ‘codecs’ parameter) and it will create a segmented MP4 file with segments starting at AV1 KEY FRAMEs and targeting 1 second duration.

MP4Box -dash 1000 -profile onDemand file_av1.mp4

Command-line for AV1 encryption/decryption

Encryption of AV1 streams in MP4 files follows the general principles given by MPEG’s Common Encryption specification.  To use MP4Box for encryption or decryption, use the following command lines where the file ‘info.xml’ is an XML file that provides encryption parameters, as described in more details here. Example of such XML files can be found in our test base.

Encryption:

MP4Box -crypt info.xml -out file_av1_encrypted.mp4 file_av1.mp4

Decryption:

MP4Box -decrypt info.xml -out file_av1_decrypted.mp4 file_av1_encrypted.mp4

Acknowledgements and conclusion

The work on AV1 and VP9 was largely sponsored by Alliance for Open Media and Netflix. Kudos to them 🙂

As usual, if you find any bug or miss documentation, let us know.