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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
Platform switches
lash -> 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:
- New packages are currently available in Debian unstable:
ladish provides the backend;
laditools contains a number of useful graphical tools to tune the session management system's whole configuration (including JACK);
gladish provides a graphical interface for the session handler, written with the GTK+2.0 libraries.
JACK needed to compile with a no-self-connect patch enabled in order to prevent clients self-connect/disconnect their own ports to ports of other JACK applications. The current jackd2 version available in Debian testing fully supports ladish and also cooperates fine with it.
ffmpeg -> 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.
New/upgraded applications
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.