News

This brings a generic metadata container, which is used by all gmerlin applications. Having the same thing defined twice in gmerlin and gmerlin-avdecoder wasn't a good idea.

08. Jun 2012 gmerlin-1.2.0 released

• Added a commandline recorder gmerlin-record
• Update for the gavl metadata API.
• The GUI transcoder got advanced tagging capabilities (mass tagging and auto-numbering)
• Updating of metadata on the fly for broadcasting plugins
• A v4l2 output plugin for redirecting the player output to a virtual video device using v4l2loopback

• Update for the gavl metadata API and a backwards compatibility layer
• Lots of new formats can be decoded: mkv with H.264 and AC3 or DTS, Graphical subtitles in mp4 and mkv files, mkv chapters
• Support for cue files associated with a wav or flac file. The cue information is available as an EDL structure.
• Update for more recent ffmpeg APIs

• An mp3 broadcasting plugin for icecast
• Matroska support in the ffmpeg encoder with support for H.264, text subtitles and chapters.
• Writing of compressed packets to FLAC files

New prereleases are available, which bring lots of bugfixes, some new features and new formats for de- and encoding. Grab them here:
gmerlin-dependencies-20120329.tar.bz2
gmerlin-all-in-one-20120329.tar.bz2

08. Jan 2011 gmerlin-1.0.0 released

This release brings support for compressed streams in the transcoder, configuration presets and lots of minor improvements and fixes.

08. Jan 2011 gavl-1.2.0 released

This brings support for compressed streams as well as some new utility functions.

08. Jan 2011 gmerlin-avdecoder-1.1.0 released

This brings support for reading compressed streams and greatly improved sample accuracy.

27. Feb 2010: Post release fixes

Fixed packages for gmerlin, gmerlin-avdecoder and gmerlin-encoders are available. The gmerlin-all-in-one package was also updated.

24. Feb 2010: gavl-1.1.2 released

• Lots of new utility functions
• MMX optimized image transformation

• Some internal cleanups for faster seeking and faster index building
• AVCHD timecode extraction
• Support for some new formats

• Great player simplification. Most changes are internal, but the user should notice much faster seeking. Also the GUI player now updates the video window while the seek-slider is moved.
• Simplification of the plugin configuration: In many places, where we had an extra dialog for configuring plugins, it was merged with the rest of the configuration.
• A new recorder application which records audio (with OSS, Pulseaudio, Alsa and ESound) and video (with V4L1, V4L2 or the new X11 grabber). Output can be written into files or broadcasted.
• A new encoding frontend (used by the recorder and transcoder), which allows more consistant and unified configuration of encoding setups.
• The video window of the GUI player has now a gmerlin icon and is grouped together with the other windows.
• Like always: Tons of fixes, optimizations and smaller cleanups

This brings better OpenGL detection in the configure script and adaption to the current gmerlin API. No new effects were added.

13. Jul 2009: gavl-1.1.1 released

• Ported to OSX and MinGW
• Parallelization of many video processing routines
• Several smaller fixes
• Some new convenience functions

• Ported to OSX and MinGW
• Major internal cleanups for faster index building and better sample accuracy. The public API is unchanged though
• Dirac decoding support with libschroedinger
• Several fixes for decoding more files

• Jack audio I/O
• Better webcam support
• Support for the new parallelization features of gavl. Many video filters got parallelized as well.
• Ported the yadif deinterlacer from mplayer
• Better default visualization
• A video thumbnailer
• Lots of fixes

• Support for timecodes
• Generic image transformation
• Varispeed capable standalone audio resampler.

Gmerlin-avdecoder now has all features, which where initially planned (plus much more). Therefore, the version is 1.0.0.

• Timecode export for many formats
• Redcode demuxer
• JPEG-2000 support (red variant only)
• Support for recent ffmpeg versions
• Support for standards based RTSP/RTP streams
• Support for mms over http.
• Some new redirector formats

• Lots of bugfixes
• Timecode support
• Filters for displaying and tweaking timecodes.
• Timecodes can be exported into quicktime timecode tracks.
• Albums can now be created from directories with the "watch directory" option. This causes the album to remain synchronized with that directory if files are added or deleted.

Some minor cleanups and fixes.

22. July 2008: gmerlin-avdecoder-0.1.8 released

• Lots of new, especially professional, formats like MXF, AVCHD, HDV and MPEG-2 in Quicktime
• Many formats can now be opened in a sample accurate mode. This is achieved by parsing the whole file and building an index. The indices are cached on disk if building them takes longer than a user specified time.
• Edit list informations contained in Quicktime- or MXF files are now exported.
• Subtitle timestamps and chapter seekpoints are now exported in their native timescales.

22. July 2008: gmerlin-effectv-1.0.0 released

These are gmerlin ports of some of the EffecTV filters. Get them at the download page.

22. July 2008: gmerlin-0.3.8 released

This release fixes lots of bugs and compilation errors. A new feature is support for EDLs.

13. May 2008: gavl-1.0.0 released

New in this release are grayscale formats, floating point Y'CbCr(A), SSE and SSE2 accelerated routines and 64 bit audio samples. gavl is now considered API stable and ready for production use. Please note that for compiling gmerlin against gavl-1.0.0, you need the latest CVS version.

19. January 2008:gavl benchmarks available

Benchmarks are generated automatically. To do benchmarks yourself, get gavl from CVS, compile it and type

./benchmark -a -html

in the src directory. Without the -html option, you'll get plain text output.

09. January 2008:gavl-0.2.7, gmerlin-0.3.7, gmerlin-encoders-0.2.5, gmerlin-avdecoder-0.1.7 and lemuria-2.0.0 releasesd
New in this release are DVB(-T) support, string translations, A/V filters, a new music visualization architecture and some minor goodies

• A DVB plugin, which loads channel maps created with the dvb-apps and opens an album with all channels found. Currently, only DVB-T support is tested. DVB-C and DVB-S support is implemented but untested (reports are welcome).
• The player and transcoder now support chapters. In the player, you have a menu and shortcuts to switch chapters. In the transcoder you can define chapters, which will be written to the file, if the encoder plugin supports it (currently only the libquicktime encoder).
• The player and transcoder can now load audio and video filters. Video filters include Blur, Equalizer (brightness, hue, saturation, contrast), Flip, Deinterlace and Decimate. For audio filters, we load ladspa plugins.
• Localization. Initial German translation (not completely done yet).
• A/V streams can now be switched during playback.
• gavl now has MMX optimized scaling routines with up to 800% speedup.
• gmerlin_avdecoder now plays DTS streams (using libdca)
• A keyboard daemon, which can bind arbitrary shell commands to multimedia keys. A GUI tool lets you configure the keys.
• Automatically generated manpages for all applications, which accept commandline options
• Launching a webbrowser with user documentation from the GUI applications
• Partly rewritten A/V pipelines for more speed, greater flexibility and fewer crashes
• Music visualizations: Can be run in the player window or by a separate visualizer program. Support for libvisual plugins
• Lemuria now comes as a gmerlin-native and a libvisual plugin and became part of the gmerlin-all-in-one package
• OpenGL accellerated video playback
• ffmpeg based demultiplexer for decoding lots of new formats (including Matroska and Monkey's Audio)
• Tweaking of A/V Settings (including filter-chains) during playback
• Improved still image viewing support

30. November 2006:gavl-0.2.5, gmerlin-0.3.5, gmerlin-visualizer-1.0.5, gmerlin-encoders-0.2.3 and gmerlin_avdec-0.1.4 releasesd
This release brings mostly bugfixes, new documentation and some smaller new features.

• Fixed many compilation errors, crashes and hangs
• The gmerlin player is now available as a commandline version. Type

  gmerlin_player -help

  for supported options.

• Tons of new formats and codecs. The number of unsupported formats is really low now.
• Source code cleaned up, lots of unneeded stuff was removed.
• Albums, which open discs (audio cds, VCDs and DVDs) now have an eject button.
• Blending of transparent overlays onto other transparent overlays is now done correctly
• Reference documentation for the gmerlin API (not complete yet).
• texinfo User documentation
• lcdproc support was fixed.

• A DVD player plugin with support for multiple audio streams (MPEG-1, AC3 or LPCM), subtitles and multiple angles. DVD menus are not supported.
• Lots of bugs where fixed (including a serious one, which caused gmerlin to crash instantly during startup on some systems). Thanks to all, who helped fixing this.
• Overall support for subtitles (both text and graphical) in the player and the transcoder.
• OSD support
• Subtitles can be read/written from/to separate files. Supported subtitle formats are srt, MPSub and the spumux-xml/png format.
• Greatly improved libquicktime plugin with encoding support for MPEG-4 (mp4) files with multichannel AAC audio and H.264 video.
• Encoding of Ogg files with any combination of theora, vorbis, flac and speex.
• The transcoder now supports audio volume normalization, 2-pass transcoding and postprocessing. A postprocessor is a plugin, which takes all produced files after transcoding and further processes them. There are postprocessors for burning WAV files to audio CDs with CD-Text (using cdrdao) and burning MPEG-files to VCDs (using vcdimager and cdrdao).
• Fixed some bugs in the Alsa plugin, which caused occasional glitches.
• A decoding plugin for mikmod. It calls the mikmod executable, so it doesn't have any compilation requirements. You cannot seek in module files, but you can transcode them into something seekable.
• Decoding support for Flash Video (FLV).
• Fixed the volume control in 32 bit mode
• Made Audio CD playback via the CD ripper possible. It's for people, who don't have an analog cable from the CD-drive to the soundcard. Go to Preferences -> Input options and disable bypass mode. It might be wise to disable paranoia mode in the configuration of the CD player plugin as well.
• CDDB support for Audio CD Metadata (using libcddb). Both musicbrainz and cddb can be en-/disabled indivdually.
• The player and transcoder now have options for forcing high quality floating point processing. For the player, this will, e.g. enable 24 bit output even if the input has 8 or 16 bits. In the transcoder, floating point processing is selectable for each stream separately.

• The player now supports viewing still images, a slideshow mode is also included.
• GUI for selection of audio and video streams for tracks which have more than one
• gavl now supports high quality video formats like 16 bit YUV (4:2:2 and 4:4:4), 16 bit RGB(A) and floating point RGB(A).
• New scaling algorithms: Quadratic, Cubic (Bspline, Mitchell, Catmul-Rom) and Sinc with Lanczos window (arbitrary order). All methods work in all pixelformats directly.
• Overall support for all flavours of chroma placements. If you select a quality level above 3 for video conversions, chroma placement will be handled correctly in pixelformat conversions.
• Support for deinterlacing. Available deinterlacing methods are copy and scale for now.
• gavl was changed for handling of generic audio channel setups. Maximum number of audio channels was increased to 128.
• New playable fileformats: Elementary MPEG-1/2 video streams, raw DV files, DV type 1 AVIs, AIFF-C files, FLI animations, NSV, OGM, NIST Sphere, Ircam, Amiga IFF and raw gsm.
• New video codecs: v210 (10 bit YUV 4:2:2), v408 (8 bit YUVA 4:4:4), VP5, VP6, Ogg Theora
• New audio codecs: GSM6.10, Quicktime 24/32 bit, float 32/64 bit, Speex
• Read support for PBM/PGM/PPM images, write support for PPM and BMP images
• Read/Write support for PNG images with 16 bits per channel.
• Read/Write support for yuv4mpeg streams (needs the latest CVS version of mjpegtools).
• Encoding of MPEG-1/2 Video/System/Program streams (needs the latest CVS version of mjpegtools). Encoding modes for VCD, SVCD and DVD are supported as well.
• Cut, Copy & Paste for albums.
• Keybaord shortcuts (see the usersguide).
• http proxy support. Note that not all proxies might support all streams. Proxy authentication is supported as well.
• Samba urls (starting with smb://) can now be loaded.
• Reference documentation for gavl and gmerlin_avdecoder.

6. June 2005: gmerlin-dependencies and gmerlin-all-in-one fixed
There was a tiny bug in both packages, which caused compilation to fail on some systems. If you don't want to download the huge files again, edit the file tools/get_directory.sh in each package and change the second line from
find -name '*?' -type d -maxdepth 1
to
find -name '[^.]*' -type d -maxdepth 1
Furthermore, if you install gmerlin-all-in-one into the default directory (/usr/local), you might need to set the enviroment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH before:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
It turns out, that you need a quite recent linux distribution, also because the dependencies require some features not found in older distributions.

4. June 2005: gavl-0.2.2, gmerlin-0.3.2, gmerlin-visualizer-1.0.2 and gmerlin_avdec-0.1.2 releasesd
This release brings Audio CD playback to gmerlin and makes the transcoder a full featured CD-Ripper which writes wav, OggVorbis, mp3, flac and AAC. New features include:

• An Audio CD plugin: It supports direct playback to the soundcard as well as ripping with cdparanoia. Metadata are read from CDtext information or downloaded from Musicbrainz. Musicbrainz data is cached in ~/.gmerlin/cdaudio_metadata/. Portable CDROM access is realized with libcdio.
• Yes, gmerlin has LOTS of dependencies, and a lot of brain load was spent on this issue. Lazy users can now compile and install everything using just 2 tarballs: gmerlin-dependencies (for some 3rd party dependencies) and gmerlin-all-in-one, which contains all gmerlin packages. To keep the amount of overall labor at a reasonable level, RPMs are no longer distributed.
• Since everyone is talking about tabbed browsing, it was realized for gmerlin too. Take a look.
• Finally some documentation. The final form(at) of the documentation isn't decided yet.
• gmerlin_avdecoder now decodes Vivo, Musepack and Tiff encoded Quicktime.
• gmerlin_avdecoder can now play files directly from anonymous ftp servers. Just drag an URL starting with ftp:// into an album.
• A new package called gmerlin_encoders with encoding plugins for Ogg Vorbis, mp3, AAC and FLAC (more to come).
• A skin browser was added to the player. Download skins at the skins section.
• TIFF image reading and writing
• BMP image reading
• The Alsa mixer was reworked a bit and should be more convenient now.
• A remote control interface lets you control various functions of the player and transcoder from the command line. Type gmerlin_remote or gmerlin_transcoder_remote without any arguments to see the options.
• The player has now two new special purpose albums: Incoming for tracks, which are loaded from the remote or the commandline and Favourites for organizing your media collection with a minimum of mouse clicks
• A software video scaler was added to gavl. Available scaling algorithms for now are nearest neighbour and bilinear interpolation. In the player, you can enable it, if hardware scaling is not possible. In the transcoder, you can scale the source video to any size you like.

15. Jan. 2005 gavl-0.2.1, gmerlin-0.3.1, gmerlin-visualizer-1.0.1 and gmerlin_avdec-0.1.1 releasesd

• Like always, fewer bugs. Some serious crashes, hangs and memory leaks have been removed.
• A new transcoder application. For now, you can create Quicktime or AVI (using libquicktime), WAV files and series of single images (jpeg, tga and png). More encoders will come in the next release.
• Elementary AAC Streams (ADTS and ADIF) are now supported. Including ID3V1/V2 tags. AAC streams via http are also supported.
• Greatly improved support for AVI, MPEG-4 and Quicktime. We play many more files now.
• Speed <-> Quality sliders for format conversions
• Support for MPEG-2 streams with lpcm audio
• Lots of uncompressed YUV and RGB decoders for Quicktime and AVI
• Initial support for LCDproc
• Support for high quality audio resampling using the secret rabbit code.
• You can now import entire directory trees into the mediatree.
• TGA image I/O, decoding of TGA encoded quicktime
• The player now has a volume control. It's a complete software solution, so it won't disturb your mixer settings.
• The album windows have a toolbar with some buttons and a display for the total time of the album. You can hide it if it bothers you.
• Support for tooltips. Switch them off if they bother you.
• Support for smil redirectors
• RPMs are now built for Fedora Core 3

• A random crash, which occurred only, if goom was not found, was removed.
• More conservative optimization options for the xaos directory make compilation with newer gcc versions possible
• The config button of gmerlin visualizer is now disabled when lemuria is selected in the list (Yes, lemuria still has NO config options).

• Programming language was downgraded from C++ to C. Compilation should be much easier now.
• No more 3rd party libraries inside the source tree. The availability of multimedia related libraries has much improved over the last 2 years, so we can link them externally now.
• Much cleaner and more modular code. A large part of the gmerlin code can be reused by other applications.
• Design philosophy was changed from the "all in one" application to separated, easier to maintain, programs.
• Check the Application page for the applications we have so far. More to come.
• Most media decoding is done with a new library gmerlin_avdec, which is avaibale as a separate package.

21. July 2004 New Website online
In preparation of the upcoming releases, the website got a new face.