UltraGrid 1.9 Release with native Apple M1 Arch support

CESNET and the Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies (SITOLA) are happy to announce a new stable release of the UltraGrid software for low-latency and high-quality video transmissions over IP networks. The current stable release is versioned 1.9 and is available for download for all supported platforms at http://www.ultragrid.cz/.

The major news in this release include:

• UltraGrid now supports Apple M1 ARM architecture natively. From now on the macOS arm64 build will be available at the download page together with the x86_64 build.
• We have added a Pipewire support. PipeWire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. It provides a low-latency, graph-based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both PulseAudio and JACK. Both audio and video capture and playback as well as a screen capture is now available through Pipewire on Linux.
• This release comes with more GUI improvements. Querying machine capabilities does not block UltraGrid GUI during the startup anymore. The vuMeter is now designed to handle multiple audio channels and implements a peak volume indicator
• We have added a basic NVidia NVDEC support for Windows and Linux. Depending on the GPU the following codecs are supported: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC), VP8, VP9, AV1.
• We have added Vulkan support on MacOS through MoltenVK.
• We have improved deinterlacing quality and performance. HDR video can now be deinterlaced (if necessary). We have also added new deinterlacing algorithms which provide better image quality (bob).
• We have implemented multiple improvements for HW accelerated video encoding and decoding. High bit-depth pixel formats are now supported with Intel GPUs through QuickSync. AMD GPUs are now supported much better. The improvements include encoding with AMF, VDPAU decoding and finally VAAPI support).

  UltraGrid is available at Github (https://github.com/CESNET/UltraGrid/). Everyone in welcome to contribute to the UltraGrid development!

  To follow the latest news on UltraGrid deployment at CESNET please check the UltraGrid Facebook profile at https://www.facebook.com/UltraGrid/ and the news at http://www.ultragrid.cz/.

  To contact the UltraGrid team please use ultragrid-dev@cesnet.cz.