Libav Meeting at Fosdem

Fosdem had been great. As Libav and VLC teams we had long meetings so I manage to attend only the nouveau presentation (and miss the Gentoo activities again =_=, sorry guys).

Here a summary of what had been discussed and the outcome.

Releases

We have the next two releases more or less planned

Libav 10 End of February

The API is almost frozen, we’ll set the branch point as soon Tim and probably Vittorio land their respective audio and interlacing patches in. We’ll get few betas out during the next 2 weeks and release the following.

I’ll take care to make sure downstreams requests regarding small features get addressed, please drop me a line.

Expect the first beta by this weekend.

Libav 11 Early summer

Due the apparently conflicting requests from downstreams, that want more major releases, and distributors, that would like have API deprecation less often, this release will have just API extension and should remain  backwards compatible with 10, that means that 12, due this Autumn, will contain all the planned deprecations.

The two items I’ll be working on will be hwaccel2 and avscale. Help in form of sponsorship and code is be welcome.

The other items being worked on will be: timestamps, scalable hevc, generic data structures to support certain codec features, multi-view frames, a complete dsputil overhaul, resulting in smaller code for focused downstreams (e.g. Chrome) and much more.

Libav 12 Mid Autumn

This release will contain some deprecations, more internal overhauls to make even simpler user just portions of Libav without requiring the rest of it and further improvements on codecs and container formats.

Documentation

We have a wiki! And we are not afraid to use it!

Migration Paths

Derek pointed out we should make easier to migrate from the old API to the newer ones, we have already some unfinisched migration documents. From release 10 they should be enough to move to the next one w/out having to dig into git in order to figure out what to do.

Blueprints

New features get some spotlight and preliminary documentation as well. This make easier to follow the development process since most of the time sifting irc and the mailing list is the only way to get the whole picture.

(In)formal Specifications

We have some part of our codebase implementing not-really-documented formats, I’ll move my notes about NUT in the wiki soon and probably we’ll try to extract from the libvpx sources some slightly more human-readable document.

Help and sponsorship is more than welcome since it will be a major chore.

Sprint

Real life meeting seem quite productive so this year we’ll have some short time meetings focused on fixing some of the long standing annoyances. The first one is in 2 weeks possibly, more details about it and the following will appear soon.

Conferences

We plan to be present during other conferences around the world (a list will appear later), the next one for me will be probably the LinuxTag.

If you are an organizer and you want somebody to participate, we’ll be glad to talk about multimedia and opensource.

Chocolate

This Fosdem instead of t-shirt I brought some special chocolate.

It is also for sale now.

LIbav gets a cut on the sales so if you want to try it we’ll be grateful as well. =)

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