ffmpeg/doc/RELEASE_NOTES

Release Notes
=============

* 11 "One Louder"

General notes
-------------

With this release we are trying to answer the numerous calls from our users for
shorter development cycles. From now on we will aim for approximately two major
releases per year.

Libav 11 is API-, but not ABI-compatible with the previous major release. This
means that the code using our libraries needs to be rebuilt, but no source
changes should be required. Note however, that a number of old APIs remain
deprecated and will be dropped in the near future. All users are strongly
encouraged to update their code as soon as possible. The doc/APIchanges file in
the Libav source tree and the migration guide on the wiki should help with
migration to the new APIs. If those are not sufficient, do not hesitate to
contact us on IRC or through the user mailing list.

One specific API issue in libavformat deserves mentioning here. When using
libavcodec for decoding or encoding and libavformat for demuxing or muxing,
the standard practice was to use the stream codec context (AVStream.codec) for
actual decoding or encoding. There are multiple problems with this pattern
(the main one is that the decoder/demuxer or encoder/muxer are not necessarily
synchronized and may overwrite each other's state), so it is now strongly
discouraged and will likely be deprecated in the future. Users should instead
allocate a separate decoding or encoding context and populate it from the
demuxing codec context (or the reverse for encoding) with the
avcodec_copy_context() function.

The main highlights of this release include native Opus, VP7, OpenEXR, and On2
AVC decoders, HEVC encoding through libx265, new APIs for exporting ReplayGain
and display transformation metadata and countless bug fixes. A large effort was
also expended on internal cleanups which are not very visible to our users,
but should make the codebase cleaner, safer and easier to maintain and extend.
One point worth mentioning is refactoring the large monolithic framework for
architecture-specific codec optimizations into small blocks, which reduces the
size of configurations that selectively enable or disable certain codecs.

The avserver streaming tool, which has not been maintained for many years and
was mostly broken, was removed from the tree. It was decided that it is a
significant maintenance burden and that we do our users no service by pretending
to support it, while we in fact do not.

See the Changelog file for a more extensive list of significant changes.

API changes
-----------

A number of additional APIs have been introduced and some existing functions
have been deprecated and are scheduled for removal in the next release.
Significant API changes include:

[libavcodec]
+  Added the avcodec_copy_context() function that must from now on be used for
   freeing codec contexts.
+- Added a new VDA hardware acceleration API, since the old one was broken and
   not fixable in a compatible way. Deprecated the old VDA API.

[libavformat]
+  Added support for exporting stream-global (as opposed to per-packet) side
   data. This feature is now used by some demuxers to export ReplayGain or
   display transformation matrix (aka rotation) or stereoscopic 3D mode.
+  Added an API for live metadata updates through event flags.
+- Changed the way to provide a hint about the desired timebase to muxers.
   Previously it was done by setting AVStream.codec.time_base. Now callers
   should set AVStream.time_base.

[libavresample]
+ Added an API for working with AVFrames.

Please see the file doc/APIchanges for details along with similar
programmer-centric information.