Prepare release notes for Libav 10 "Eks"

Additional editing by Diego Biurrun
11 years ago · fe533ffdcf
--- a/doc/RELEASE_NOTES
+++ b/doc/RELEASE_NOTES
@@ -1,61 +1,40 @@
 Release Notes
 =============

 * 9 "Plain Nine"
 * 10 "Eks"

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

 From this release onwards, we have decided to drop the leading zero from our
 release numbers. There were no plans of ever changing it, so it carried no
 information. Thus this release is just a plain 9, the next will be 10 etc.

 A new library arrived in Libav during this development cycle -- its name is
 libavresample and it handles audio conversion and mixing. All users are
 encouraged to use it instead of the old, now deprecated, audio conversion
 API in libavcodec.

 The libpostproc library now resides in a separate tree. It was fully independent
 of the other Libav libraries, not used by any of the tools and saw very little
 development. For these reasons we decided that it has no place in Libav. A
 standalone Git tree is available at http://git.videolan.org/?p=libpostproc.git
 for people wishing to use libpostproc.

 The major versions of the libavcodec, libavformat and libavfilter libraries have
 been bumped, so they are not API or ABI compatible with the 0.8 release. The
 ffmpeg transcoding tool, kept for compatibility in 0.8, has also been dropped.

 This release brings a number of significant changes in the libavfilter library.
 Firstly, all the API dealing with filter internals is no longer public. The
 result is that creating user-side filters will not be supported until
 libavfilter is more mature.
 Secondly, full audio filtering support is now available along with a set of
 basic audio filters. We hope that their number will soon grow significantly.
 The avconv transcoding tool has of course been extended to handle audio
 filtering as well.
 There were a number of other API changes, most importantly the addition of
 the buffer sink public API.

 In the libavcodec library, one of the most notable changes is added support for
 planar audio (i.e. not interleaved). Many decoders and encoders, that previously
 did inefficient (de)interleaving internally, now only work with planar audio
 formats. Libavresample can be used for optimized conversion between interleaved
 and planar formats.

 Of big interest to our Windows users, Libav now supports building with the MSVC
 compiler. Since MSVC does not support C99 features used extensively by Libav,
 this has been accomplished using a converter that turns C99 code to C89. See the
 platform-specific documentation for more detailed documentation on building
 Libav with MSVC.

 As usual, this release also contains support for some new formats, many smaller
 new features and countless bug fixes. We can highlight Opus decoding / encoding
 through libopus, encoders for Apple ProRes and Ut Video, WMA Lossless and
 RealAudio Lossless decoders, fragmented MOV/MP4 and ISMV (Smooth Streaming)
 muxers, 24-bit FLAC encoding, a large number of RTMP improvements and support
 for cover art in ID3v2, WMA, MP4 and FLAC.

 See the Changelog file for a list of significant changes.
 One of the main features of this release is the addition of reference-counted
 data buffers to Libav and their use in various structures. Specifically, the
 data buffers used by AVPacket and AVFrame can now be reference counted, which
 should allow to significantly simplify many use cases. In addition,
 reference-counted AVFrames can now be used in libavfilter, avoiding the need
 for a separate libavfilter-specific frame structure. Frames can now be passed
 straight from the decoders into filters or from filters to encoders.

 These additions made it necessary to bump the major versions of libavcodec,
 libavformat, libavdevice, libavfilter, and libavutil, which was accompanied by
 dropping some old deprecated APIs. These libraries are thus not ABI- or API-
 compatible with the previous release. All the other libraries (libavresample
 and libswscale) should be both ABI- and API-compatible.

 Another major point is the inclusion of the HEVC (AKA H.265, the successor of
 H.264) decoder in the main codebase. It was started in 2012 as a Libav Google
 Summer of Code project by Guillaume Martres and subsequently completed with
 the assistance of the OpenHEVC project and several Libav developers.

 As usual, this release also contains support for other new formats, many smaller
 new features and countless bug fixes. We can highlight a native VP9 decoder,
 with encoding provided through libvpx, native decoders for WebP, JPEG 2000, and
 AIC, as well as improved WavPack support with encoding through libwavpack,
 support for more AAC flavors (LD - low delay, ELD - enhanced low delay), slice
 multithreading in libavfilter, or muxing chapters in ASF. Furthermore there is
 more fine-grained detection of host and target libc, which should allow better
 portability to various cross compilation scenarios.

 See the Changelog file for a fuller list of significant changes.

 Please note that our policy on bug reports has not changed. We still only accept
 bug reports against HEAD of the Libav trunk repository. If you are experiencing
@@ -72,30 +51,31 @@ 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]:
 * New video encoding API, similar to the previously introduced audio  encoding
  API, which encodes from an AVFrame to an AVPacket, thus allowing it to
  properly output timing information and side data.

 * All CODEC_ID_* symbols now carry AV_ prefixes. Non-prefixed codec IDs are
  deprecated.

 * New codec descriptor API, which allows getting the properties of a given codec
  (identified by its ID), without referring to a specific decoder or encoder.

 * An AVFrame must now be freed with a dedicated function, avcodec_free_frame().

 [libavutil]:
 * New audio FIFO API, which simplifies managing/merging/splitting audio buffers.

 * new int/float type punning API

 [libavfilter]:
 * All filter internals were hidden.

 * audio filtering.

 * new buffer sink API for getting frames out of libavfilter.
 [libavutil]
 + added the reference-counted buffers API (buffers.h)
 + moved the AVFrame struct to libavutil and added a new API for working with
  reference-counted AVFrames (frame.h)

 [libavcodec]
 + added an API for working with reference-counted AVPackets (av_packet_*)
 +- converted VDPAU to the hwaccel framework; the old way of using VDPAU is no
   longer supported
 - old audio encoding and decoding APIs removed
 - old video encoding API removed
 - deprecated enum CodecID removed (enum AVCodecID should be used instead)
 - deprecated audio resampling API removed (libavresample should be used
  instead)

 [libavfilter]
 +- replaced AVFilterBufferRef with AVFrame; AVFilterBufferRef and everything
   related to it still exists, but is deprecated
 + converted all filters to use the AVOptions system for configuration, it is
  now possible to query the supported options, their values and set them
  directly with av_opt_*
 + added a slice multithreading framework
 +- merged avfiltergraph.h to avfilter.h, using AVFilterGraph is now explicitly
   mandatory (it was implicitly required even before); added new API for
   allocating and initializing filters

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