Membrane Core release 1.3

Recently @Membrane-Core-Team released version 1.3 of membrane_core package. You can get it from hex.pm by adding {:membrane_core, "~> 1.3"} to deps in mix.exs of your project.

New guides

We gathered some feedback on what parts of Membrane are confusing and could use more learning materials and created some more guides to help getting more familiar with Membrane:

• What are timestamps in multimedia and their role in Membrane. Timestamps — Membrane Core v1.3.4
• Everything you need to know about Pads - the things that connect components into actual pipelines. Everything about pads — Membrane Core v1.3.4
• Demystifying manual demands - the way you handle flow control when auto-demands aren’t enough. Manual demands — Membrane Core v1.3.4
• What are crash groups and how to use them to manage crashes in a controlled manner. Crash Groups — Membrane Core v1.3.4
• How to integrate Membrane into existing Elixir applications. Using Membrane in Elixir Application — Membrane Core v1.3.4

Tasks for code generation

All the big dog libraries in Elixir have Mix tasks for generating starter code - project skeletons, module templates, etc - and now Membrane has them too. We added tasks for creating templates for all the component types in Membrane. For example, if you call

$ mix membrane.gen.filter My.Filter

a lib/my/filter.ex file will be created with a My.Filter filter template. This template will have all the code required for a minimal working Filter, alongside commented out sections for optional functionalities.
See mix membrane.gen — Membrane Core v1.3.4 and other tasks for more.

AI skill

We’ve noticed that AI coding agents don’t always write Membrane Framework code perfectly. They frequently reach for APIs from outdated versions, or miss out on recent improvements. The likely reason: today’s models still draw heavily on training data scraped 3-4 years ago, when the Membrane Framework looked quite different.

To address this, we’ve shipped an official SKILL.md for AI agents, dedicated to anything involving the framework.
If you use Claude Code, install it via the plugin system:

/plugin marketplace add membraneframework/membrane_core
/plugin install membrane-framework@membrane

For a cross-agent install, get it using

npx skills add membraneframework/membrane_core -g

You can find more info about this topic in our README.

Membrane Actions upgrades

Version 1.3 provides the following improvements and upgrades in Membrane actions mechanism:

• new broadcast action - improved successor of forward. You can use it to send any type of a Membrane stream item, like buffer, event or stream format.
• now demand action accepts also buffers’ timestamps. More info on how to use this functionality in the manual demands guide.