Wayland 1.0 Coming "In A Month Or Two"

Kristian Høgsberg just finished speaking at this year's GStreamer Conference behind held in San Diego, California. Kristian was talking about the forthcoming Wayland 1.0 release and Wayland's hardware-accelerated video playback support.

Hours after Rob Clark of Texas Instruments showed off an interesting and experimental Wayland demo utilizing yet-to-be-released OMAP4 Wayland support and smooth 1080p video playback from a low-power ARM development board, Wayland creator Kristian had a few more things to say.

With this being a GStreamer multimedia conference and nothing that' X.Org/Mesa/Wayland-specific, the hour-long Wayland session was rather basic and nothing too special as it's catered to a different audience. If you follow all of the Wayland coverage on Phoronix going back to 2008 when I was first to publicly mention the project, you already are briefed on a majority of the content shared during today's presentation.

Kristian went through the Wayland basics, the design of Wayland and the reference Weston compositor, and then went into low-level details about Wayland's recent video playback support. (Høgsberg did a Wayland demo too, this time demonstrating Wayland GStreamer tear-free video playback with VA-API video acceleration on Intel Sandy Bridge hardware. That video will be posted on Phoronix later in another article.)

Working today for video playback in Wayland is a GStreamer software plug-in, Intel VA-API hardware-accelerated support, the VA-API library for GStreamer plug-in works with Wayland, and the MPlayer2 EGL back-end support was recently written when aiming for Wayland compatibility.

Høgsberg also reaffirmed his plans for releasing Wayland 1.0 this calendar year. In particular, he says that Wayland 1.0 -- along with Weston 1.0 -- should happen "in a month or two." It was earlier this year during FOSDEM in Brussels that he brewed the Wayland 1.0 release plans (see the technical plans for Wayland 1.0).

Wayland/Weston v0.95 was released last month as one of the last milestones before this first major Wayland release that promises stability of the Wayland API, protocol, and libraries. Kristian also reaffirmed that Wayland 1.0 won't mark the point of "world domination" but Wayland will continue to be actively developed and still maturing after the version 1.0 release.