open source News - Page 51 of 92 - CNX Software

April 25, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Ubuntu Touch to Be Officially Supported on Librem 5 Open Source Smartphone

Ubuntu Touch looked really promising as a Linux mobile operating system supporting mobile desktop convergence, so eventually some people would have been able to use a single device for their mobile and desktop needs. If was not for lack of trying, but sadly Canonical had to end the development of Ubuntu Touch due to lack of interest from phone manufacturers and the community at large, focusing their resources instead of the cloud and IoT. But some people were still very enthousiastic about Ubuntu Touch, Unity and convergence, so since the code was open source, UBPorts continued working on Ubuntu Touch on their own. UBPorts developers have now collaborated with Purism to make Ubuntu Touch one of the officially supported operating systems for the Librem 5 smartphone. Librem 5 will still ship with GNOME based PureOS, but Purism will support customers who want to easily install Ubuntu Touch or PureOS with […]

April 24, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Kite is an Open Source Hardware Android Smartphone Powered by Snapdragon 450 Processor (Crowdfunding)

Kite is an open source hardware Android phone kit specifically targeting makers which you can assemble yourself into a Kitephone. The phone is based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 mainboard (Kiteboard v2), and comes with a 720p touchscreen display module, a 12MP camera, antennas, buttons, a 3,000 mAh battery, and a Raspberry Pi HAT compatibility board to optionally interface to external hardware. Kiteboard v2 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 octa-core Arm Cortex A53 @ 1.8 GHz with Adreno 506 GPU System Memory – 2 GB RAM Storage – 16 GB storage + microSD card slot Connectivity Cellular LTE Cat. 6/3G/2G, 2x nano SIM slots (dual-SIM dual standby) Two variant North America with LTE FDD Bands: 2,4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 25, 26 LTE TDD Bands: 41 WCDMA 850, 1700, 1900, 2100 GSM 850, 1900 Rest of the World (Europe, Russia, etc…) LTE FDD Bands: 1, 3, 5, 7, […]

April 22, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

FFmpeg 4.0 Released with Initial AV1 Support, aptX, etc..

Whenever you are playing videos on a machine running Linux, Android or Windows, chances the software is at least partially using code from FFmpeg, a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The developers just outed a new major release FFmpeg 4.0 “Wu” which adds new filters, more hardware features, drops Windows XP and ffserver, implements initial AV1 codec support, aptX, TiVo ty+, and more. FFmpeg 4.0 includes the following libraries version:

libavutil      56. 14.100
libavcodec     58. 18.100
libavformat    58. 12.100
libavdevice    58.  3.100
libavfilter     7. 16.100
libswscale      5.  1.100
libswresample   3.  1.100
libpostproc    55.  1.100

libavutil 56. 14.100

libavcodec 58. 18.100

libavformat 58. 12.100

libavdevice 58. 3.100

libavfilter 7. 16.100

libswscale 5. 1.100

libswresample 3. 1.100

libpostproc 55. 1.100

and some of the main changes include: Bitstream filters for editing metadata in H.264, HEVC and MPEG-2 streams Experimental MagicYUV encoder TiVo ty/ty+ demuxer Intel QSV-accelerated MJPEG encoding & overlay filter native aptX and aptX HD encoder and decoder NVIDIA NVDEC-accelerated H.264, HEVC, MJPEG, MPEG-1/2/4, VC1, VP8/9 hwaccel decoding mcompan & acontrast audio filters OpenCL overlay filter video mix filter video normalize filter audio lv2 wrapper filter VAAPI MJPEG and VP8 decoding […]

April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

$1.80 CH551 Mini Development Board Features 8-bit C51 Core, USB Interface, and I/Os

Last year, WCH (Nanjing QinHeng Corp.)’s launched a CH55x family of microcontroller based on an 8-bit C51 core with a USB interface, and extra I/Os depending on the selected part number Electrodragon is now listing a tiny USB development board based on CH551 for $1.80, and the chip itself sells for as low as 1.60 RMB (0.25 USD) on Taobao. Specifications: MCU – WCH CH551 8-bit C51 micro-controller USB – 1x USB type A port I/Os – 18 through holes exposing all I/Os from the MCU including GPIOs, USB, 3.3V, 5V GND Misc – On-board power led, user LED (P3.0) Power – 5V via USB port (or pin?) You won’t need an external hardware – such as a USB to TTL board – to program the boards since the MCU supports USB. To enter into programming mode, short connect the two pins in the middle of the board (DL) with […]

April 9, 2018April 9, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

TinyFPGA BX is a Tiny Open Source Hardware iCE40 FPGA Board that Fits into a Breadboard (Crowdfunding)

Last Friday, I wrote about Fipsy, a $10 breadboard-friendly FPGA board powered by Lattice Semi MachXO2 FPGA with 256 LUTs, but I then remember I had covered a board somewhat similar with TinyFPGA board last year based on either the same MachXO2-256 (TinyFPGA A1), or a slightly more powerful MachXO2-1200 FPGA (TinyFPGA A2). It happens the developer is now running a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdsupply for TinyFPGA BX board, which can be used with a breadboard, and is powered by Lattice Semi ICE40LP8K FPGA that will offer more flexibility thanks to 7,680 LUTs. TinyFPGA BX specifications: FPGA – Lattice Semi ICE40LP8K FPGA with 7,680 four-input look-up-tables, 128 KBit block RAM, Phase Locked Loop Storage – 8 MBit of SPI Flash Expansion 2x 14-pin header for I/Os, GND and Vin 21x solder pads on back of the board USB – 1x micro USB 2.0 FS port for programming Oscillator – 16 […]

April 6, 2018April 6, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 34 Comments

Shedbuilt Binary Blob-Free Linux Distribution Works with Allwinner H3/H5 Boards (Orange Pi, Libre Computer)

Most open source Linux distributions are only partially open source, as while most packages will be built from publicly available source code, they usually come with closed source binary blobs for GPU drivers, wireless module firmware and so on. Shedbuilt is described as “a decentralized, self-hosting GNU/Linux for Arm devices built from the latest upstream sources”, and as the developer (Auston Stewart) explains – see comments section – it does not contain any binary blob. Eventually the distribution may support more boards, but for now, the current System 1 “Amano” release supports four Allwinner H3/H5 boards: Orange Pi PC, Orange Pi One, Orange Pi PC 2, and Libre Computer ALL-H3-CC “Tritium”. Orange Pi Lite (with WiFi) and Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC “Le Potato” images are said to be coming soon. You can download the SD card images and access documentation on Shedbuilt.net. The Linux distribution relies on Shedmake script to automate […]

March 29, 2018March 29, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

AOMedia AV1 Video Codec Specifications Released

AOMedia’s AV1 video codec is an open source, royalty-free video codec aiming to surpass H.265 capabilities, and considering the savings to be made, as no royalties need to be paid, and potentially lower bandwidth requirements, many companies are on board including Google, Arm, Facebook,. Amazon, Apple, Intel, Cisco, and many others. Back in February we got an AV1 progress update at FOSDEM 2018, and the speaker explained there was still a few items to work out to finalize the specifications. This is now complete, as AOMedia (The Alliance for Open Media) has just released the (draft) specifications. Beside the Bitstream specification, the AV1 release includes: Unoptimized, experimental software decoder and encoder to create and consume the bitstream Reference streams for product validation Binding specifications to allow content creation and streaming tools for user-generated and commercial video AV1 has already been shown to outperform both H.265 and VP9 in tests using […]

March 19, 2018March 19, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

LG Releases webOS Open Source Edition Optimized for Raspberry Pi 3

webOS, originally developed by Palm, is a Linux based multitasking operating systems with support for HTML5 and CSS3. It is now found in most (all?) new LG smart TVs, and the TV manufacturer has decided to expand the adoption of webOS by collaborating with the South Korean government and local startups, and released an open source version , webOS Open Source Edition, available publicly at http://webosose.org. webOS Open Source Edition 1.0 is said to be optimized for the Raspberry Pi 3, and the company provides build instructions on the “setting up” page of the website to build the firmware image, which you can then flash to a micro SD card. The idea is to for a community around the open source version webOS, and let different categories of developers or users contribute to the project: System UI Developers – The System UI is based on Blink and Qt, and developers […]