GPAC Project on Advanced Content

GPAC

GPAC Multimedia Open Source Project
Developer Jean Le Feuvre, People@GPAC[1][2]
Written in C
OS family Multimedia framework
Working state Current
Source model Open source
Initial release 2003 (2003)[3]
Latest release 0.6.0 / February 19, 2016 (2016-02-19)[4]
Latest preview 0.5.1 / 2014 (2014)[5][6]
Marketing target MP4, DASH, Mobile
Platforms Cross-platform
Default user interface CLI, GUI, plugins
License LGPL v2 and later
Official website gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr

GPAC Project on Advanced Content (GPAC, a recursive acronym) is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard written in ANSI C. GPAC provides tools for media playback, vector graphics and 3D rendering, MPEG-4 authoring and distribution.[7]

GPAC provides three sets of tools based on a core library called libgpac:

GPAC is cross-platform. It is written in (almost 100% ANSI) C for portability reasons, attempting to keep the memory footprint as low as possible. It is currently running under Windows, Linux, Solaris, Windows CE (SmartPhone, PocketPC 2002/2003), iOS, Android, Embedded Linux (familiar 8, GPE) and recent Symbian OS systems.

The project is intended for a wide audience ranging from end-users or content creators with development skills who want to experiment the new standards for interactive technologies or want to convert files for mobile devices, to developers who need players and/or server for multimedia streaming applications.

The GPAC framework is being developed at École nationale supérieure des télécommunications (ENST) as part of research work on digital media.

History and standards

GPAC has roots in a New York city startup 1999.[8] As an open-source project GPAC officially started in 2003 with the initial goal to develop from scratch, in ANSI C, clean software compliant to the MPEG-4 Systems standard, a small and flexible alternative to the MPEG-4 reference software.[3] It is actually licensed under LGPL.

In parallel, the project has evolved and now supports many other multimedia standards, with some good support for X3D, W3C SVG Tiny 1.2, and OMA/3GPP/ISMA and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) features. 3D support is available on embedded platforms through OpenGL-ES.

The MPEG-DASH feature can be used to reconstruct .mp4 files from (e.g., YouTube) videos streamed and cached in this format.[9] Various research projects used or use GPAC.[10] Since 2013 GPAC Licensing offers business support and (closed source) licenses.[11]

Multimedia content features

Packaging

GPAC features encoders and multiplexers, publishing and content distribution tools for MP4 files and many tools for scene descriptions (BIFS/VRML/X3D converters, SWF/BIFS, SVG/BIFS, etc.…). MP4Box provides all these tools in a single command-line application. Current supported features are:[12]

Playing

GPAC supports many protocols and standards, among which:[12]

Streaming

As of version 0.4.5, GPAC has some experimental server-side and streaming tools:[12]

Contributors

The project is hosted at ENST, a leading French engineering school also known as Télécom ParisTech. Current main contributors of GPAC are:[2]

Other (current or past) contributors from ENST are:[2]

Additionally, GPAC is used at ENST for pedagogical purposes. Students regularly participate in the development of the project.[2]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Jean Le Feuvre; Cyril Concolato; Jean-Claude Moissinac (2007). "GPAC: open source multimedia framework". Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia. ACM Digital Library. pp. 1009–1012. doi:10.1145/1291233.1291452. ISBN 978-1-59593-702-5. Retrieved 2014-01-28. (subscription required (help)).
  2. 1 2 3 4 "About us". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  3. 1 2 3 Romain Bouqueau (2014-01-22). "5000th commit, 10 years of open-source software". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  4. ↑ "GPAC 0.6.0". GPAC Multimedia Open Source Project. 2016-02-19. Retrieved 2016-03-03.
  5. ↑ "gpac alpha". SourceForge project gpac. 2014. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  6. ↑ "GPAC Nightly Builds". Latest available binaries. People@GPAC. 2014. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  7. 1 2 3 Jean Le Feuvre; Cyril Concolato (2012-12). "GPAC, Toolbox for Interactive Multimedia Packaging, Delivery and Playback". Open Source Column. ACM SIGMM Records. ISSN 1947-4598. Retrieved 2014-01-28. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ↑ "About us". GPAC Licensing. 2013. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  9. ↑ Nir Sofer (2013). "VideoCacheView". NirSoft.net. Retrieved 2014-01-28. uses MP4Box installed as a part of GPAC package to convert the MPEG-DASH streams into a valid mp4
  10. ↑ "Other academic works using GPAC". Publications. People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  11. 1 2 Romain Bouqueau (2013-05-09). "GPAC Licensing". GPAC Licensing. Retrieved 2014-01-28. The GPAC and MP4Box trademarks are internationally registered by Telecom ParisTech
  12. 1 2 3 "GPAC features". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Cyril Concolato; Jean Le Feuvre; Jean-Claude Moissinac (2008-05). "Design of an Efficient Scalable Vector Graphics Player for Constrained Devices". IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics (Vol. 54 issue 2). pp. 895–903. doi:10.1109/TCE.2008.4560176. Retrieved 2014-01-28. Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

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