All posts by romain bouqueau

GPAC documentation updates

Announcing New Documentation for GPAC

For over two decades, GPAC and MP4Box have been at the forefront of multimedia processing innovation, continuously evolving and expanding their capabilities. This journey has seen the software mature and grow in scope over time. The documentation, too, has accumulated and evolved, with specific portions even becoming deprecated. As the GPAC landscape widened, we saw a need for accessible, up-to-date documentation that was able to grow alongside our technologies.

Ten years ago as we moved to GitHub for our public version control server, we migrated to the github wiki system: a nice improvement in developer experience to produce documentation at the time. This move marked a significant step forward, enhancing the developer experience and facilitating the creation and sharing of knowledge.

But today, with the large amount of documentation now provided to cover usage of GPAC filters along MP4Box, we felt the GitHub Wiki had shown its limits: the combined lack of support for HTTP redirects and poor search functionality of GitHub’s Wiki made it less appealing compared to the many alternatives available these days for software documentation.

Introducing a better documentation solution based on mkdocs

We settled with the excellent mkdocs framework, using the popular materials for mkdocs theme. This transition is not merely a change of platform but a significant upgrade to how our community accesses and interacts with GPAC documentation.

The upgrade provides a more refined user experience, a nicer look and feel on any device, a light and dark mode, improved navigation, an intuitive layout and table of contents. 

The upgraded GPAC Wiki is now hosted in a github repository of its own, making it easier to welcome contributions to the documentation.

But most importantly, the new documentation is now instantly searchable, making it easier than ever to find the relevant information for your MP4Box and GPAC use cases:

We invite you to explore the new documentation site at wiki.gpac.io.

Your feedback is invaluable to us, you can contribute the documentation or share your suggestions for improvements as issues on github.

Website Update: Your Feedback is Essential

Dear GPAC Community,

Major updates have been made to the GPAC website. To improve clarity and structure, we have undertaken a comprehensive revision to enhance the user experience that is being deployed. 

Understanding Our Users

To ensure that the revamped website aligns with the needs and preferences of our community, we are keen to understand who is using GPAC, any potential gaps in our current website, and any additional insights you might be willing to share. Your feedback is invaluable to us, and we’d appreciate if you would complete the survey.

A Brief Overview of GPAC

GPAC, since its inception, has always been more than just a multimedia framework. With capabilities ranging from hybrid broadcast-broadband scenarios to virtual reality (VR) and 3D scenes, GPAC stands out in its versatility and innovation. Our commitment to standards, demonstrated by accolades such as the Emmy awarded to ISOBMFF in 2021, is a testament to our dedication to excellence.

The success of GPAC is a collective effort. From its beginnings as a startup in New York City in 2000 to its evolution as a leading open-source project, the commitment and expertise of our contributors have been pivotal. Our collaboration with esteemed institutions like Télécom Paris and partnerships with entities like Motion Spell have further enriched our journey. 

We are also deeply grateful to our major sponsor, Netflix, not only for their strong support of the developer community here at GPAC but also for their dedication to open standards and innovation. Their alignment with our vision was further exemplified last year when Netflix successfully integrated GPAC software into its global content operations.

Engage with Us

We invite you to share your thoughts via the survey. Whether you’re involved in video streaming, research, or are a developer keen on multimedia frameworks, your insights will shape the future direction of GPAC.

We appreciate your continued support and engagement with GPAC.

The GPAC team

​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!

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.