GStreamer 1.0 Is Looking To Finally Be Released Soon

Keynoting the GStreamer 2012 Conference in San Diego was Wim Taymans of Collabora. Taymans was talking about GStreamer 1.0, which should be officially released very soon -- perhaps before GNOME 3.6 ships.

Releasing GStreamer 1.0 has been talked about for more than a year, but it looks like the release is finally coming together.

GStreamer 1.0 adds a lot, to the extent that Taymans says, "We're now out of ideas for things to add." Some of the improvements to this open-source multimedia library include better memory management, better integration support, increased performance, easier dynamic pipelines, PulseAudio pass-through support, GStreamer meta-data work for attaching to buffers, improved audio/video caps, ported to GIO, etc. More on GStreamer 1.0 changes for interested developers are highlighted by this GStreamer FreeDesktop.org Wiki page.

Cheese, Rhythmbox, and other major GNOME applications have already been ported to the GStreamer 1.0 API. This presents a problem since GNOME 3.6 is coming next month and so there's now a pressing problem of either having GNOME 3.6 use an unreleased GStreamer 0.11 version, undo all of this porting and go back to the stable GStreamer 0.10 series, or to finally release GStreamer 1.0. GStreamer 0.10 is in maintainer-mode now with GStreamer's master branch now on GStreamer 0.11/1.0, so the ideal thing to do is finally release GStreamer 1.0 for GNOME 3.6.

Blocking GStreamer 1.0 at this point is that the new library "needs a bit more testing." The biggest change was the conversion of the base video classes and there's a few bugs remaining there, plus a few other areas (e.g. dynamic pipeline) not well tested. For GStreamer plug-ins, there's more changes to be made for 1.0 compatibility compared to making an application supported by this forthcoming release.

When GStreamer 1.0 is released, the developers acknowledge that GStreamer 0.10 isn't suddenly going to disappear. "We expect 0.10 and 1.0 to run in parallel for a while." A "big problem" with GStreamer 1.0 is porting the DVD playback support, which likely won't happen before 1.0 release, so a parallel GStreamer 0.10 library install may be needed. Ideally the DVD playback API to be supported in time, but no development time has yet been spent on it.

For those wondering about the hardware-accelerated video decoder support for GStreamer 1.0, there is active work being done for supporting NVIDIA VDPAU. Intel is also working on VA-API GStreamer 1.0 support. An OpenMAX decoder should also be working. "[The hardware support] is looking pretty good."

GNOME 3.6 is scheduled for release on the 26th of September while the hard code freeze is happening on the 17th of September. With that said, the Collabora developer says, "we're trying to release 1.0 soon." How soon is soon? "Before [GNOME] 3.6."

Today and tomorrow hope to figure out when to actually release GStreamer 1.0. Under pressure now to release sooner rather than later. Acknowledged during the keynote was that not everything may be working for the GStreamer 1.0 release: it's a big milestone. It might take a minor release or two before all problems are ironed out and GStreamer 1.0.x becomes fit for multimedia success.

Follow @MichaelLarabel on Twitter for more GStreamer details this week, pictures, etc, from the event taking place -- along with LinuxCon North America 2012 -- in San Diego, California.