6 The FFmpeg Project proudly presents FFmpeg 2.6 "Grothendieck", about 3
7 months after the release of FFmpeg 2.5.
8
9 A lot of important work got in this time, so let's start talking about what
10 we like to brag the most about: features.
11
12 A lot of people will probably be happy to hear that we now have support for
13 NVENC — the Nvidia Video Encoder interface for H.264 encoding — thanks to
14 Timo Rothenpieler, with some little help from NVIDIA and Philip Langdale.
15
16 People in the broadcasting industry might also be interested in the first
17 steps of closed captions support with the introduction of a decoder by
18 Anshul Maheswhwari.
19
20 Regarding filters love, we improved and added many. We could talk about the
21 10-bit support in spp, but maybe it's more important to mention the addition
22 of colorlevels (yet another color handling filter), tblend (allowing you
23 to for example run a diff between successive frames of a video stream), or
24 the dcshift audio filter.
25
26 There are also two other important filters landing in libavfilter: palettegen
27 and paletteuse. Both submitted by the Stupeflix company. These filters will
28 be very useful in case you are looking for creating high quality GIFs, a
29 format that still bravely fights annihilation in 2015.
30
31 There are many other new features, but let's follow-up on one big cleanup
32 achievement: the libmpcodecs (MPlayer filters) wrapper is finally dead. The
33 last remaining filters (softpulldown/repeatfields, eq*, and various
34 postprocessing filters) were ported by Arwa Arif (OPW student) and Paul B
35 Mahol.
36
37 Concerning API changes, there are not many things to mention. Though, the
38 introduction of device inputs and outputs listing by Lukasz Marek is a
39 notable addition (try ffmpeg -sources or ffmpeg -sinks for an example of
40 the usage). As usual, see doc/APIchanges for more information.
41
42 Now let's talk about optimizations. Ronald S. Bultje made the VP9 decoder
43 usable on x86 32-bit systems and pre-ssse3 CPUs like Phenom (even dual core
44 Athlons can play 1080p 30fps VP9 content now), so we now secretly hope for
45 Google and Mozilla to use ffvp9 instead of libvpx. But VP9 is not the
46 center of attention anymore, and HEVC/H.265 is also getting many
47 improvements, which include C and x86 ASM optimizations, mainly from James
48 Almer, Christophe Gisquet and Pierre-Edouard Lepere.
49
50 Even though we had many x86 contributions, it is not the only architecture
51 getting some love, with Seppo Tomperi adding ARM NEON optimizations to the
52 HEVC stack, and James Cowgill adding MIPS64 assembly for all kind of audio
53 processing code in libavcodec.
54
55 And finally, Michael Niedermayer is still fixing many bugs, dealing with
56 most of the boring work such as making releases, applying tons of
57 contributors patches, and daily merging the changes from the Libav project.
58
59 A more complete Changelog is available at the root of the project, and the
60 complete Git history on
http://source.ffmpeg.org.
61
62 We hope you will like this release as much as we enjoyed working on it, and
63 as usual, if you have any questions about it, or any FFmpeg related topic,
64 feel free to join us on the #ffmpeg IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) or ask
65 on the mailing-lists.
