GStreamer 1.2 Feature Release Is Now Available

[Teho]

Why is there three ways to do the same(?) thing? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of an abstraction layer? To be clear, I am curious, not trolling.

Well only Phonon and Qt Multimedia are compareable as Qt Gstreamer is just a wrapper libary and the other two do a lot more. I don't know much about the history behind Phonon and Qt Multimedia so I won't go there. Phonon is probably bit more flexible than Qt Multimedia in sense that it support multiple backends on multiple platforms and Qt Multimedia only support GStreamer on Linux, whether such flexibility is needed is another question.

[Krysto]

VP9 encoding/decoding, and WebP image decoding

It must be one of the first projects to adopt VP9. Nice.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Gstreamer is a multiplatform multimedia backend amd there's no need for yet another abstraction layer ( which by the way won't use all the features that the backed Ali offers)

I agree with these sentiments. Then again I would like to see ObjC interfaces to Gstreamer be leveraged on OS X and within GNUStep.

[psychoticmeow]

It must be one of the first projects to adopt VP9. Nice.

Now if only Mozilla would get their arse into gear and implement support for GStreamer 1.2. They've been talking around implementing 1.0 for a year, and we've got next to nothing to show for it.

Then I'd be able to play VP9 in browser

[mendieta]

Wow, what a bunch of anti-KDE, anti-C++, anti whatever trolling. I actually came here to ask if anyone knows of plan for Ubuntu 11.10 inclusion, but I guess, the answer is obvious, it's way too late. I care, because I use PiTiVi for video, which depends on gstreamer.

[Teho]

Wow, what a bunch of anti-KDE, anti-C++, anti whatever trolling.

There's a simple solution for that: add Hoton to your ignore list.

[mendieta]

Ah, thank you all! Hope Pitivi starts releasing more often! Cheers!

[TheBlackCat]

No. It was an abstraction layer needed by Qt to serve different DRM platforms to the paying customers. Later it was tossed over the wall and adopted by KDE for reasons unknown to man kind. LSD might have been involved.

No, that is an absolute, blatant lie. Phonon was originally developed by KDE, then adopted by Qt. But it has always been primarily a KDE project, developed primarily by KDE developers.

[TheBlackCat]

Why is there three ways to do the same(?) thing? Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of an abstraction layer? To be clear, I am curious, not trolling.

Phonon is a high-level abstraction layer designed to make it very easy to make simple audio or video players or recorders. It intentionally lacks a lot of advanced or low-level functionality because it is intended for more basic tasks. For example you probably wouldn't want to make a non-linear video editor out of it.

QtMultimedia is a middle-level abstraction layer. It provides more advanced features and more control but also makes it more difficult to implement basic functionality.

QtGstreamer is just a Qt-style C++ wrapper around Gstreamer, and thus is very low-level. It basically replicates the Gstreamer API but in a manner more suitable for C++ developers. It also adds some basic tools to make it easier to incorporate Gstreamer into Qt applications. It provides much more control and much more advanced features, but also requires a lot more work to get basic media player functionality.

So if you want to add a video preview to a file browser, or have a basic music player, then Phonon is the way to go. If you want access to the raw media data when you do the playback, you probably want QtMultimedia. If you want to do a lot of complex processing for your video or audio you probably want QtGstreamer.

[Krejzi]

I hope it is backwards compatible with 1.0 since I hate having different versions of the same thing...

It is. Only thing it broke was gstreamer-vaapi and clutter-gst hardware decoder support (which uses gstreamer-vaapi) since it used experimental library from gst-plugins-bad, which got removed in 1.2 release. Totem, Cheese, Rhythmbox work just fine (no ABI break either).