Previous announcements

Bits from the Debian Multimedia Team

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers have been quite active since the Squeeze release, and have some interesting plans for the Wheezy release cycle. Here we give you an update on what work has been done and work that is still ongoing.

Plans for Wheezy

Debian switches to ladish

LASH Audio Session Handler was abandoned upstream in favor of the new session management system, called ladish: LADI Session Handler.
ladish will allow users to run many JACK applications at once and save/restore their configuration with few mouse clicks.

The current status of the integration between the new session handler and JACK may be summarized as follows:

As of now, maintainers are encouraged to disable lash support whenever feasible and upload packages to experimental (note that ladish is not yet available in sid) in order to ease the testing of the new session handler.

Debian switches to Libav

As you might have noticed, there have been some disruptive changes inside the FFmpeg project. In Debian, we'll be following the ?http://libav.org fork, which seems to be the friendlier side with more activity. So far, the real winner of these events have been the users as important developments, such as frame based multi-threading (575600), have finally been merged.

mplayer2

After years of parallel development, the mplayer2 fork has matured a lot. Currently, mplayer2 has been packaged can currently be found in experimental. We are currently considering what to do with the old mplayer package as mplayer2 no longer provides mencoder, but offers a number of other promising features. It will be uploaded to unstable as soon as it can be compiled against the system Libav, which in turn requires updating to the upcoming yet-to-be-released version 0.7.

LV2 revision 4

Debian Wheezy will bring the newest 4th revision of the LV2 technology. Most changes affect the packaging of new plugins and extensions, a brief list of packaging guidelines is now available.

Activity statistics

More information about team's activity are available at http://blends.alioth.debian.org/multimedia/.

Where to reach us

The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org for packaging related topics, or at debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.


  1. laditools has already joined Debian testing. (1)