• The DAV1D AV1 Video Decoder Has Become Very Fast

  It was just two months ago that the VideoLAN/VLC crew announced the DAV1D AV1 video decoder and already it's becoming quite feature complete and super fast.

  In a performance report shared today, DAV1D now covers the entire AV1 spec and all features for 8-bit and 10-bit depth.This decoder is up to 400% faster than the reference libaom decoder and usually at least 100% faster.

• [Mesa-dev] [ANNOUNCE] mesa 18.3.0-rc4

  The fourth release candidate for Mesa 18.3.0 is now available.

• Mesa 18.3-RC4 Released With A Handful Of Fixes

  The fourth weekly release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for testing while the official release could be coming in the days ahead.

  Originally Mesa 18.3.0 was due to be released before the US Thanksgiving holiday, but that didn't quite happen as planned. However, that release doesn't appear to be far off. The 18.3 release tracker currently indicates just one blocker bug remaining. That lone bug is about a user pointer deadlock in the Vulkan CTS (Conformance Test Suite) for the Intel ANV Vulkan driver. Once that's fixed, we could see Mesa 18.3.0 or depending how long that takes they could divert to Mesa 18.3.0-RC5. Regardless, Mesa 18.3.0 will hopefully be out within the next two weeks or so.

• Malicious Kodi Add-ons Install Windows & Linux Coin Mining Trojans

• Windows And Linux Kodi Users Ravaged By Nasty Monero Cryptocurrency Mining Malware

• Windows and Linux Kodi users infected with cryptomining malware

• Kodi add-ons launch cryptomining campaign

• Some Kodi add-ons are carrying cryptocurrency mining malware

• As Kodi suffers more blocks, bans and fines, users now given another stark warning

  With millions of users across the globe, Kodi is one of the most popular online TV players on the market.

  Kodi itself is safe to use and totally legal.

Let's be honest -- in a world with easy legal streaming thanks to inexpensive services like Netflix and Hulu, Kodi media center is probably used mostly by pirates. It is not likely the average consumer is storing video and music files locally to play on their TV -- it simply isn't worth the hassle these days. With that said, not all Kodi users are thieves -- I am sure some are legally buying media for playback on the media software... maybe...

Regardless of why you use Kodi (I'm not judging), the best way to experience it is through a Linux distribution that focuses on it. LibreELEC, for instance, is a lightweight distro that exists only to run the Kodi media center. It is quite popular with Raspberry Pi owners, but it runs on other hardware too, including x86_64 and WeTek boxes. Kodi 18 "Leia" recently achieved Beta 1 status, and as a result, LibreELEC 9.0 Alpha has been updated with it. In other words, the most bleeding edge LibreELEC now runs the most bleeding edge Kodi.

• 5 cool music player apps

  Do you like music? Then Fedora may have just what you’re looking for. This article introduces different music player apps that run on Fedora. You’re covered whether you have an extensive music library, a small one, or none at all. Here are four graphical application and one terminal-based music player that will have you jamming.

• youtube-viewer – alternative way to interact with YouTube

  There are tons of really useful command-line multimedia utilities available for Linux (and other platforms). cmus, youtube-dl, castero are to name just three essential command-line multimedia apps that frequent my shell.

  If you’re looking for another way to watch YouTube videos, you should also check out youtube-viewer. It’s billed as a semi-automatic tool for browsing YouTube. It has lots of advanced options, including search-based filtering on various criteria and support for selecting videos matched by a regular expression.

  The software offers both a command-line interface to YouTube as well as a graphical interface. The software is written in the Perl programming language. For GTK YouTube Viewer my system was missing File::ShareDir. Installing the perl-file-share package fixed the problem.

• Nova is an open-source video player for phones, tablets, and Android TV

  inding the perfect media player on the platform you like to enjoy watching or listening to content on can be a pain in the butt. I remember this being such a hassle on the desktop PC until VLC came around, and now most of the people in the know either use it or MPC-HC. Then people began watching more content on their smartphones, and again, it led to a huge search for the go-to application to use. For a long time, this ended up being an application called MX Player, which has been downloaded by over 500,000 million users. As people have begun to move away from MX Player, a new open-source video player has emerged and it is being called Nova.

  So you may wonder if MX Player had such a strong following then why are so many people looking for alternatives? We see this from time to time though. An application gets so big that some feel it becomes bloated with features, and some feel the updates aren’t pushed out fast enough, or a recent user update has tarnished the experience. However, in the case of Android’s most popular media player, it was actually when MX Player was all of a sudden acquired by a media giant in India. This started to worry people because once a popular application gets acquired, the parent company almost always ruins what made it so great.