┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ RELEASE NOTES for FFmpeg 2.6 "Grothendieck" │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The FFmpeg Project proudly presents FFmpeg 2.6 "Grothendieck", about 3 months after the release of FFmpeg 2.5. A lot of important work got in this time, so let's start talking about what we like to brag the most about: features. A lot of people will probably be happy to hear that we now have support for NVENC — the Nvidia Video Encoder interface for H.264 encoding — thanks to Timo Rothenpieler, with some little help from NVIDIA and Philip Langdale. People in the broadcasting industry might also be interested in the first steps of closed captions support with the introduction of a decoder by Anshul Maheswhwari. Regarding filters love, we improved and added many. We could talk about the 10-bit support in spp, but maybe it's more important to mention the addition of colorlevels (yet another color handling filter), tblend (allowing you to for example run a diff between successive frames of a video stream), or eventually the dcshift audio filter. There is also two other important filters landing in libavfilter: palettegen and paletteuse, submitted by the Stupeflix company. These filters will be very useful in case you are looking for creating high quality GIF, a format that still bravely fights annihilation in 2015. There are many other features, but let's follow-up on one big cleanup achievement: the libmpcodecs (MPlayer filters) wrapper is finally dead. The last remaining filters (softpulldown/repeatfields, eq*, and various postprocessing filters) were ported by Arwa Arif (OPW student) and Paul B Mahol. Concerning API changes, not much things to mention. Though, the introduction of devices inputs and outputs listing by Lukasz Marek is a notable addition (try ffmpeg -sources or ffmpeg -sinks for an example of the usage). As usual, see doc/APIchanges for more information. Now let's talk about optimizations. Ronald S. Bultje made the VP9 decoder usable on x86 32-bit systems and pre-ssse3 CPUs like Phenom (even dual core Athlons can play 1080p 30fps VP9 content now), so we now secretly hope for Google and Mozilla to use ffvp9 instead of libvpx. But VP9 is not the center of attention anymore, and HEVC/H.265 is also getting many improvements, which includes optimizations, both in C and x86 ASM, mainly from James Almer, Christophe Gisquet and Pierre-Edouard Lepere. Even though we had many x86 contributions, it is not the only architecture getting some love, with Seppo Tomperi adding ARM NEON optimizations to the HEVC stack, and James Cowgill adding MIPS64 assembly for all kind of audio processing code in libavcodec. And finally, Michael Niedermayer is still fixing many bugs, dealing with most of the boring work such as making releases, applying tons of contributors patches, and daily merging the changes from the Libav project. A more complete Changelog is available at the root of the project, and the complete Git history on http://source.ffmpeg.org. We hope you will like this release as much as we enjoyed working on it, and as usual, if you have any question about it, or any FFmpeg related topic, feel free to join us on the #ffmpeg IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) or ask on the mailing-lists.