GStreamer Might Tackle DRM, Blu-Ray Support

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 8 December 2013 at 01:12 PM EST. 37 Comments
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At the recent GStreamer Conference 2013 there was a presentation on "Taking Gstreamer to the Next Level" and in there some interesting features were brought up.

The GStreamer Conference 2013 videos were uploaded this past week as covered in the aforelinked article. The conference itself happened at the end of October in Edinburgh, Scotland. Unfortunately I wasn't at the GStreamer event this year due to lack of funding, but I'm now going through and looking at the interesting content that was covered.

The "Taking Gstreamer to the Next Level" was a keynote by Tim-Philipp Müller. Being a keynote, first the usual history of GStreamer was covered and on last year's major GStreamer 1.0 debut. GStreamer 1.0 was a humungous effort that spanned many years and overhauled the multimedia framework.

Since the GStreamer 1.0 release we've seen GStreamer 1.2 arrive with only some modest new features and GStreamer 1.4 is now under development. Tim-Philipp Müller's presentation was trying to express some ideas about what is the next major milestone for the open-source project.

Among the features that Müller acknowledged as currently missing from GStreamer (and could be targeted for work in the future) include sandboxing of plug-ins, DRM (Digital Rights Management support for protected content), and Blu-ray support. There certainly would be many Linux users interested in better Blu-ray support! Other expressed ideas were end-to-end hardware acceleration across multiple layers/APIs, nicer platform-specific higher-level APIs, and overhauling of subtitle handling and rendering.

Aside from feature work, Tim-Philipp Müller admitted another problem that drags on the project -- and many other open-source projects -- and that is quality assurance. Tim-Philipp said that QA for GStreamer is one of their "biggest challenges" in ensuring no major regressions and if it was handled correctly to allow for faster, more confident releases.

Another expressed possible idea for GStreamer going forward is the development of better tools to deal with debugging and development. As part of that, GStreamer developers would like to see more people engage with upstream development like SoC vendors. After that, the last item mentioned as a "main challenge" was better maintenance for the multimedia project.

Those wanting to learn more about taking GStreamer to the next level can watch the Ubicast video recording. Next year at GStreamer Conference 2014 hopefully we'll hear of at least few of the improvements/features being completed.
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