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!