We wish to thank the Google Summer of Code project for sponsoring the FFmpeg project. Thanks to the SoC program for 2006, the FFmpeg project was able to get help from students to implement more native codecs.
The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms and SSA/ASS/color subtitles.
Furthermore we can now run natively on Intel Macs (you just have to pass --disable-win32 --disable-mp3lib to configure), -endpos was finally added to MPlayer and the Windows GUI has seen a number of improvements.
Vorbis decoding has seen a big speedup, as has H.264. The optimizations to H.264 are still ongoing, but the difference should already be noticeable.
And last not least many bugs were found and fixed since pre8.
MPlayer 1.0rc1 will no longer load a file-specific configure file located in the same directory as the file you're playing, because of potential security concerns (thanks to Rudolf Polzer for pointing this out); if you want to restore the old behavior add -use-filedir-conf.
If you already have the binary codec package from pre8 you don't need to redownload it: The new 20061022 packages do not contain any new codecs, they just miss some that now work natively.
MPlayer 1.0rc1: "Codename intentionally left blank"
DOCS:
German documentation translation finished
Russian documentation translation synced and almost finished
Drivers:
IVTV hardware MPEG audio/video decoder output
ALSA audio output: AC3 passthrough now works even when the device name of the digital output port has been set by the user
bicubic OpenGL scaling works with ATI cards
md5sum switched to the libavutil MD5 implementation
support for libcaca 1.0 via compatibility layer
Decoders:
liba52 updated to 0.7.4 (slightly faster)
SSE optimizations for mp3lib
removed support for obsolete and non-free divx4 libraries
Demuxers:
audio stream switching in MPEG-TS/PS, Matroska and streams supported by libavformat
audio stream switching between streams with different codecs
libavformat demuxer now honors -alang
chapter seeking in Matroska files
fixed seeking to absolute and percent position for libavformat demuxer
NUT demuxer using libnut
Matroska SimpleBlock support
Inputs:
split of stream layer from libmpdemux to new stream library
PVR input for hardware MPEG encoder based cards, such as Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150/250/350/500 AKA IVTV but also pvrusb2 and cx88 (requires Linux >= 2.6.18 kernel, featuring native V4L2 MPEG API)
native RTSP input (handles MPEG-TS over RTP) for generic RTSP servers
support for seeking to chapters in dvd:// and dvdnav:// streams
radio support (radio://)
FFmpeg/libavcodec:
VC-1/WMV3/WMV9 video decoder
Vorbis decoding speedup, now default Vorbis decoder
VMware Video decoder
On2 VP50 and VP62 decoder
lossless audio decoders: WavPack, TTA, Shorten
CAVS decoder
GXF muxer/demuxer
MXF demuxer
much improved FLAC encoder
more H.264 decoding speed improvements, plus support for -lavdopts fast
Theora decoder fixes
preliminary Vorbis encoder
MTV demuxer
GUI:
Windows version added
drag-and-drop ignored last file
save and load cache setting correctly
working audio stream selection for Ogg and Matroska files
executable names like gmplayer_old etc. will now start GUI as well
-gui/-nogui options
xinerama fixes, now behaves similar to MPlayer without GUI
Filters:
MMX-optimizations for -vf yadif
MMX-optimizations for -vf zrmjpeg
MEncoder:
support of x264 encoding via libavcodec
rewrite -x264encopts option parser to use the 264 option parser; likely breaks 3rd party tools as the syntax of some options has changed
removed support for obsolete and non-free divx4 libraries
Ports:
partial Intel Mac support, --disable-win32 --disable-mp3lib is needed
OpenGL can now create windows > screen size under Windows
allow filenames starting with \\ for remote paths on Windows
Others:
SSA/ASS subtitle renderer
-endpos option for MPlayer
-correct-pts option
UTF-8 used for OSD and subtitles, some bitmap fonts will no longer work correctly and -subcp must be set for all non-UTF-8 subtitles
more audio-truncation fixes
libavutil mandatory for MPlayer compilation
more intuitive -edlout behaviour
-nortc is now default since -rtc has disadvantages with recent kernels
