About

The Nope Forge project is current developped and maintained by Clément Bœsch and Matthieu Bouron. Both of them have a long experience with multimedia: former FFmpeg developers, they worked in the broadcasting industry, general consumer video production and graphics technologies.

Clément Bœsch

Co-founder, developer

Matthieu Bouron

Co-founder, developer

While the project is free and open-source, we welcome sponsoring to help us continue to work on it. Please check the Contribute page for more information.

History

This project was initially developed in 2016 at a French startup company named Stupeflix. It took inspiration from the scene graph paradigm of the OSG game engine for which many clumsy in-house patches were maintained, essentially for video playback support and lazy resources management.

The video playback logic was the first foundation to be extracted from these patches, and landed in a dedicated module named “sxplayer” (standing for “Stupeflix Player”), a free (LGPL) video playback library on top of FFmpeg.

While it helped with maintenance, most of the OSG features remained unneeded, the custom Python bindings were unmaintained, painful to work with and tied to a specific version of OSG, preventing us from using a more recent version. The stack of patches added on top of the project was also tied to the same specific version of OSG and was particularly challenging to rebase due to its complexity. It was decided to prototype a new engine, more oriented toward video compositing rather than video games. Also, mobile platforms (iOS and Android) became first class citizen because mobiles applications were the main business target.

The “node.gl” name was selected, merely as a joke and word play with “node.js” and OpenGL, along with the fact that the scene graph is composed of nodes.

The project was open-sourced under Apache license when the GoPro company acquired Stupeflix (late 2016). The main authors of the project, Clément Bœsch and Matthieu Bouron, carried on with its development for years, making it a core element of the GoPro Quik mobile editing application.

Along the years, the project matured into a significant engine for video compositing, animations, video playback, color management, and was notably entirely redesigned to support more modern graphics backends.

Around the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, Matthieu and Clément left the GoPro company and decided to maintain the project under a new name: the Nope Foundry. sxplayer and node.gl were respectively renamed to nope.media and nope.gl. The direction of the project then took a new turn, focusing on providing a free and open-source framework for motion design, 2D composition and visual effects.

Soon after the launch, the Foundry company pressured us into renaming the project to “avoid confusing users”, so the project was renamed to Nope Forge.

In November 2023, GoPro decided to close the public access to their source code repository. This means that the Nope Forge project is now the main public proof of the history of the project.

During that same month, the Nope Forge company was created to back up the project. Consulting services and donations were officially opened as means to financially support the project.