GPAC was founded in New York City in 19993 as a company called AviPix. In 2003, it became open-source, with the initial goal of developing from scratch, in ANSI C, clean software compliant with the MPEG-4 Systems architecture standard, as a small and flexible alternative to the MPEG-4 reference software.4
In parallel, as MPEG-4 was intended to compete with Macromedia Flash, GPAC evolved to support other standards such as X3D, W3C SVG Tiny 1.2, and OMA/3GPP/ISMA and eventually MPEG-DASH. The MPEG-DASH feature can be used to reconstruct .mp4 files from videos streamed and cached in this format (e.g., YouTube).5 Various research projects used or use GPAC.6
In 2019 the GPAC team explained the code has undergone a massive re-architecture7 called Filters with release 0.9 while release 0.8 is the last release of the legacy architecture with an extended 18-months support. The front-end applications remain unchanged, making the transition seamless. The underlying filters build a dynamic modular dataflow pipeline.
In 2020 GPAC 1.0 was released. The Website was split into a wiki documentation, a doxygen API documentation, a buildbot and GitHub actions, a testbot with a high coverage.8 The new gpac application has been used as a FFmpeg on steroids9 offering additional speed, features, ease of use.
Since 2013, GPAC Licensing has offered business support and closed-source licenses.10 In 2022 Netflix announced using GPAC for their worldwide content operations 11 including the Netflix service, studio content, and merchandising material.12
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:13
GPAC supports many protocols and standards, among which:15
As of version 0.4.5, GPAC has some experimental server-side and streaming tools:18
The project is hosted at Télécom_Paris, a leading French engineering school. Current main contributors of GPAC are:19
Other (current or past) contributors are:25
Additionally, GPAC is used at Télécom Paris for pedagogical purposes. Students regularly participate in the development of the project.31
Jean Le Feuvre; Cyril Concolato (December 2012). "GPAC, Toolbox for Interactive Multimedia Packaging, Delivery and Playback". Open Source Column. ACM SIGMM Records. ISSN 1947-4598. Archived from the original on 2014-01-29. Retrieved 2014-01-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20140129095710/http://records.sigmm.ndlab.net/2012/12/open-source-column-gpac/ ↩
"Release GPAC 1.0 · gpac/gpac". GitHub. Retrieved 2024-10-30. https://github.com/gpac/gpac/releases/tag/v1.0.0 ↩
GPAC (2013). "About us". GPAC Licensing. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://www.gpac-licensing.com/contact/about-us/ ↩
Romain Bouqueau (2014-01-22). "5000th commit, 10 years of open-source software". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://gpac.io/2014/01/22/5000th-commits-10-years-of-open-source-software/ ↩
Sofer, Nir (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 http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/video_cache_view.html ↩
GPAC. "Other academic works using GPAC". Publications. People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://gpac.io/about/references/#rd ↩
"Rearchitecture - GPAC wiki". wiki.gpac.io. Retrieved 2024-10-30. https://wiki.gpac.io/Filters/Rearchitecture/ ↩
"GPAC wiki". wiki.gpac.io. Retrieved 2024-10-30. https://wiki.gpac.io/#developer-resources ↩
Bouqueau, Romain (2013-05-09). "GPAC Licensing". GPAC Licensing. Retrieved 2014-01-28. The GPAC and MP4Box trademarks are internationally registered by Telecom ParisTech http://www.gpac-licensing.com/2013/05/09/gpac-licensing/ ↩
Bouqueau, Romain (2013-05-09). "Netflix deploys GPAC as their primary packager". GPAC Licensing. Retrieved 2024-07-25. GPAC deployed by Netflix as their primary packager https://gpac.io/2022/11/08/press-release-motion-spell-deploys-gpac-open-source-software-with-netflix/ ↩
Rayburn, Dan (2013-05-09). "NAB Streaming Summit 2023". NAB Streaming Summit. Retrieved 2024-07-25. Netflix uses GPAC in all their packaging scenarios https://nabstreamingsummit.com/videos/videos-2023vegas/ ↩
"GPAC features". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://gpac.io/gpac-features/ ↩
Cyril Concolato; Jean Le Feuvre; Jean-Claude Moissinac (May 2008). "Design of an Efficient Scalable Vector Graphics Player for Constrained Devices". IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics. 54 (2). IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics (Vol. 54 issue 2): 895–903. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.648.6798. doi:10.1109/TCE.2008.4560176. S2CID 1722027. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://biblio.telecom-paristech.fr/cgi-bin/download.cgi?id=8182 ↩
"About us". People@GPAC. Retrieved 2014-01-28. http://gpac.io/about/ ↩
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. 978-1-59593-702-5 ↩