Understanding upcoming changes in GPAC
The release of GPAC 0.8 in June 2019 is an important milestone. The professional video industry likes releases. On the other hands development teams have enjoyed our stable nightly builds for years. Both will love our future plans.
The changelog of this v0.8.0. is impressive. It contains usual updates (more codecs, updated standards, CMAF, ...). It also shows new areas such as:
- production formats (QuickTime MOV with ProRes constraints, HDR),
- an ATSC3 stack (awarded at NAB)
- image formats (HEIF, AVIF, MIAF),
- security (fuzzing).
The next challenge we want to tackle for GPAC 1.0 are the external APIs of GPAC. While command-line tools such as MP4Box are popular, our programming APIs are often too close to the technology. With dozens of heterogeneous specifications on board this was needed.
Most users consider technology as a tool. They don't dare digging into specifications. This creates a support bottleneck where some users contact us solely because they need us to experiment. It is obvious that a project like GPAC, with a huge codebase which development cost is estimated as $10M+, should limit unnecessary interactions with its community.
After 6 years of thoughts and 2 years of background work, we launch a pre-release (tagged as v0.9.0) of what the future of GPAC will look like: Filters. Filters was the missing brick that prevented some of the GPAC Licensing prospects to become customers.
Filters will lower the cost of innovations. Filters will lower the cost of integrating a single GPAC brick inside your existing workflows.
GPAC has become incredibly popular. It is the only lightweight system that contains so much advanced playback technology (some details can be found on the version 0.9 branch announcement). We are more invited than we can travel for conferences or trainings, our social media presence has improved, and we plan to update our websites to reflect that. With GPAC Licensing we signed the most prestigious customers and won industry awards.
The best is yet to come!
