All posts by romain bouqueau

Website Update: Your Feedback is Essential

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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.

GPAC Community Survey

Please note we will close the survey on 31 December 2023. 

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

News

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

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!

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.