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© 1993–2026 by Reto Kromer

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#AVpres Newsletter 2026-02-23

Table of Contents

  1. The FFmpeg Package
  2. The FFV1 Video Codec
  3. The mpv Media Player
  4. LTO Formatting with LTFS
  5. Call for Presentations
  6. Software Used by Archives

1. The FFmpeg Package

1.1. Training

Finally, we could held both beginners FFmpeg courses, our company and the hosting Lichtspiel taking over part of the costs.

 

For Memoriav we organised an intermediate FFmpeg course in German and French:

The inscriptions are open until 6 March.

1.2. Installation

Since September 2025, Homebrew installation no longer works on macOS 10.14 and earlier versions of Apple’s operating systems. And from September 2027, Homebrew installation will no longer work on x86-64 architectures, but only on AArch64 (ARM64) architectures. This affects also our own formula, which is parametrisable. Therefore, we are thinking about a possibility to offer an easy method to install freely parameterised FFmpeg versions also on older Apple operating systems and x86-64 architectures.

1.3. FFmpeg 8.1

The next version of FFmpeg is currently planned for March 2026. The release should be cut off the development branch mid-March, in order to conclude and merge the ongoing work and make the entire Vulkan code fully usable without external dependencies. This means that, sadly, it cannot be included in the coming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS distribution.

2. The FFV1 Video Codec

Some work is expected to be carried out this year on FFV1: among other things, the implementation of GPU support for floating-point numbers and Bayer support is currently planned.

Since 2015 Reto has been advocating for Bayer to be integrated into popular video codecs, including FFV1. Jérôme Martinez (“Monsieur MediaInfo”) made a first draft on GitHub in 2018. We started publicly presenting on this topic probably in 2019, when we devoted one of our Reports from the Field to it. Reto gave a detailed presentation at the No Time to Wait conference in Den Haag in 2022.

3. The mpv Media Player

The official Homebrew formula now builds the “mpv” media player with the new “ffmpeg-full” formula and no longer with any FFmpeg distribution. For this very reason, we added to our Homebrew tap a formula for building this media player with our own FFmpeg distribution, which can be configured according to all needs.

To tap into our repository: brew tap avpres/formulae

To install: brew install avpres/formulae/mpv

(Of course, if you need specific options, you must install FFmpeg with those options before installing mpv.)

4. LTO Formatting with LTFS

From time to time people contact us about LTO cartridges of generation 4 or earlier which are allegedly formatted with LTFS. The short answer is that such cartridges simply do not exist.

LTFS was introduced with LTO-5, because LTFS requires 2 or more partitions on a tape, and the partition feature was introduced only into LTO-5. Tapes of older generations are formatted either with regular TAR or with a proprietary TAR-based format such as BRU or Retrospect, but never with LTFS.

5. Call for Presentations

This year, the organisers are facilitating participation in both “No Time to Wait” in Warsaw and the joint IASA and BAAC conference in Vilnius over two consecutive weeks.

No Time to Wait 10
14–16 October 2026 at Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (FINA) in Warsaw, Poland
https://mediaarea.net/NoTimeToWait10
There is no deadline for submissions.
Disclaimer: AV Preservation by reto.ch is the main recurring sponsor of this annual open-source conference.
IASA–BAAC Joint Conference 2026
19–22 October 2026 at Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius
“Archives in Times of Peace and War: Safeguarding Audiovisual Memory, Identity, and Authenticity”
https://2025.iasa-web.org
The deadline for submissions is 13 April 2026.
Disclaimer: AV Preservation by reto.ch is a sponsor of IASA.

6. Software Used by Archives

CLI = command-line interface
GUI = graphical user interface
web = web interface

Aaru Data Preservation Suite (CLI)
“All-in-one solution for digital media preservation and archival.”
Version 5.4.2 LTS has has been released on 2026-02-14:
https://github.com/aaru-dps/Aaru
AEO-Light (GUI)
Extraction of optical sound tracks form image digitisations with sufficient overscanning.
Version 2.4 has has been released on 2025-07-23:
https://github.com/usc-imi/aeo-light
Audacity (GUI)
Recording and editing sounds.
Version 3.7.7 has been released on 2025-11-25:
https://www.audacityteam.org/
Bash
Command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input, a string or a script file.
Version 5.3.9 has been released on 2025-12-10:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
This is the shell we use daily.
DCP-o-matic (GUI)
“Get any content cinema-ready.”
Version 2.18.37 has been released on 2026-02-10:
https://dcpomatic.com/
FFmpeg (CLI)
The FFmpeg package consists of the three commands ffmpeg (a media transcoder), ffprobe (a media metadata extractor) and ffplay (a media player), as well as seven librairies including libavformat (a container collection), libavcodec (a codec collection) and libavfilter (a filter collection).
Version 8.0.1 has been released on 2025-11-20:
https://ffmpeg.org/
fq (CLI)
“Tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.”
Version 0.16.0 has been released on 2025-12-07:
https://github.com/wader/fq
HandBrake (GUI)
A video transcoder.
Version 1.10.2 has been released on 2025-09-06:
https://handbrake.fr/
MediaConch (GUI, CLI and web)
“Implementation checker, policy checker, reporter, and fixer that targets preservation-level audiovisual files.”
Version 25.04 has been released on 2025-05-05:
https://mediaarea.net/MediaConch
https://mediaarea.net/MediaConchOnline/
MediaInfo (GUI and CLI)
The most popular metadata extractor.
Version 26.01 has been released on 2026-02-02:
https://mediaarea.net/MediaInfo
MKVToolNix (GUI)
Create, alter and inspect Matroska files.
Version 97.0 has been released on 2026-01-02:
https://mkvtoolnix.download/
mpv (CLI and GUI)
“A free, open source, and cross-platform media player.”
Version 0.41.0 has been released on 2025-12-21:
https://mpv.io
This is our preferred media player, which we use with our own FFmpeg distribution.
Nano (CLI)
A small and friendly text editor. This is not a word processing software.
Version 8.7.1 has been released on 2026-02-04:
https://www.nano-editor.org/
This is our preferred text editor.
OpenEXR
The reference implementation of the OpenEXR file format (and video codec).
Version 3.4.5 has been released on 2026-02-21:
https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr
QCTools (GUI)
Analyse and understand digitised video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering.
Version 1.4.1 has been released possibly on 2025-05-19:
https://mediaarea.net/QCTools
https://github.com/bavc/qctools
We don’t know when exactly the last version has been released, but we know that since 2026-01-13 it’s finally available for all operating systems.
RAWcooked (CLI)
“Encode and decode audio-visual RAW data with Matroska, FFV1 and FLAC.”
A bridge between uncompressed still images and lossless compressed video stream formats.
Version 25.12 has been released on 2025-12-30:
https://mediaarea.net/RAWcooked
Disclaimer: We have supported this project since its inception, and Reto co-owns the copyright.
Shutter Encoder (GUI)
A media transcoder.
Version 19.9 has been released on 2026-02-08:
https://github.com/paulpacifico/shutter-encoder
The Cable Bible
A valuable resource by Ethan Gates.
Version 2025-11-20 is online:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/cable-bible
VLC (GUI)
A very popular media player.
Version 3.0.23 has been released on 2025-12-19:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Reto participated at the Video Dev Days 2018, organised by VideoLAN in Paris, where Jean-Baptiste Kempf presented the plans for VLC 4.0. Unfortunately seven and a half years later it is still in Beta.
vrecord (CLI/GUI)
Open-source software for capturing a video signal and turning it into a digital file.
Version 2026-02-06 has been released on … 2026-02-06:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/vrecord
yt-dlp (CLI)
A feature-rich command-line media downloader.
Version 2026.02.21 has been released on … 2026-02-21:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

 

Best regards from Joshua, Michal and Reto

2026-02-23