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.