GPAC Introduction
Current version: 26.08-DEV
Latest Release: 26.08-DEV
GPAC is an open-source multimedia framework focused on modularity and standards compliance.
GPAC provides tools to process, inspect, package, stream, playback and interact with media content. Such content can be any combination of audio, video, subtitles, metadata, scalable graphics, encrypted media, 2D/3D graphics and ECMAScript.
GPAC is best-known for its wide MP4/ISOBMFF capabilities and is popular among video enthusiasts, academic researchers, standardization bodies, and professional broadcasters.
For more information, visit https://gpac.io
GPAC is distributed under the LGPL v2.1 or later, and is also available, for most of it, under a commercial license.
Please ! cite ! our work in your research:
Features
GPAC can process, analyse, package, stream, encode, decode and playback a wide variety of contents. Selected feature list:
- Audio: MPEG audio (mp1/2/3, aac), AC3, E-AC3, Opus, FLAC, …
- Video: MPEG 1 / 2 / 4 (H264/AVC) / H (HEVC), VVC, AV1, VP9, Theora, ...
- Subtitles: WebVTT, TTML (full, EBU-TTD, …), 3GPP/Apple Timed Text, …
- Encryption: CENC, PIFF, ISMA, OMA, ...
- Containers: MP4/fMP4/CMAF/Quicktime MOV/ProRes MOV, AVI, MPG, OGG, MKV, ...
- Streaming: MPEG-2 Transport Stream, RTP, RTSP, HTTP, Apple HLS, MPEG-DASH, ATSC 3.0 ROUTE, ...
- Supported IOs: local files, pipes, UDP/TCP, HTTP(S), custom IO
- Presentation formats: MPEG-4 BIFS, SVG Tiny 1.2, VRML/X3D
- JS scripting through QuickJS for both SVG/BIFS/VRML and extending GPAC framework tools
- 3D support (360 videos, WebGL JS filters…)
- Inputs: microphone, camera, desktop grabbing
- Highly configurable media processing pipeline
- Python and NodeJS bindings
Features are encapsulated in processing modules called filters:
- to get the full list of available features, you can run the command line
gpac -h filters or check filters' wiki.
- to get the full list of playback features, check the dedicated wiki page.
Tools
MP4Box
MP4Box is a multi-purpose MP4 file manipulation for the prompt, featuring media importing and extracting, file inspection, DASH segmentation, RTP hinting, ... See MP4Box -h, man MP4Box or our wiki.
gpac
GPAC includes a filter engine in charge of stream management and used by most applications in GPAC - read this post for more discussion on how this impacts MP4Box.
The gpac application is a direct interface to the filter engine of GPAC, allowing any combination of filters not enabled by other applications. See gpac -h, man gpac, man gpac-filters or our wiki for more details.
Getting started
Download
Stable and nightly builds installers for Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, iOS are available on gpac.io.
If you want to compile GPAC yourself, please follow the instructions in the build section of our wiki.
Documentation
The general GPAC framework documentation is available on wiki.gpac.io, including HowTos.
GPAC tools are mostly wrappers around an underlying library called libgpac which can easily be embedded in your projects. The libgpac developer documentation is available at doxygen.gpac.io, including documentation of JS APIs, Python APIs and NodeJS APIs.
Testing
GPAC has a test suite exercising most features of the framework. The test suite is in a separate repository https://github.com/gpac/testsuite/, but is available as a submodule of the GPAC main repository. To initialize the testsuite submodule, do git submodule update --init.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
