At rOpenSci we are developing on a suite of packages that expose powerful graphics and imaging libraries in R. Our latest addition is av – a new package for working with audio/video based on the FFmpeg AV libraries. This ambitious new project will become the video counterpart of the magick package which we use for working with images.

The gifski package which was demonstrated in May at eRum 2018 in Budapest is now on CRAN. Gifski is a simple but powerful package which can hopefully take away an important performance bottleneck for generating animated graphics in R. What is Gifski Gifski is a multi-threaded high-quality GIF encoder written in Rust. It can create animated GIF images with thousands of colors per frame and do so much faster than other software.