GStreamer 1.4 Will Be Bringing Many New Features

GStreamer 1.4 is under heavy development ahead of its next release that's due out in March or April. Here's a look at some of the new features coming to this open-source multimedia framework relied upon by many Linux desktop applications. Among the best additions to GStreamer 1.4 is support for H.265, VP9, and Daala. Wayland is also now supported.

Tim-Philipp Müller and Sebastian Dröge gave a presentation last week at FOSDEM 2014 about GStreamer and its future. There are PDF slides available for those interested while below are what I found to be the most interesting highlights.

- GStreamer 1.4 will bring better hardware integration with support for sharing of hardware contexts in the pipeline, new implementations/infrastructure for handling hardware-specific memory, and there's many code clean-ups and fixes.

- The VA-API GStreamer support will be faster and provide better integration along with other video APIs. VA-API continues to be Intel's preferred interface for video acceleration on Linux. For other GPUs, the VDPAU support in GStreamer is also being improved.

- GStreamer 1.4 will provide better support on embedded systems.

- There will be good support for OpenMAX in GStreamer 1.4, which is great since there's now an OpenMAX Gallium3D state tracker in Mesa and that's how the open-source Radeon driver is exposing open-source VCE encode support.

- There's Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) video decoder support.

- The OpenGL GStreamer plug-in is seeking to improve the media framework's OpenGL support and allow for transparent usage of OpenGL filters inside piplines, rendering to the screen or downloading from the GPU, is multi-threaded, and works on all supported GStreamer platforms.

- BlueZ Bluetooth support made it into GStreamer 1.4.

- GStreamer 1.4 also has support for H.265/HEVC and VP9 video formats. There's also initial Xiph.Org Daala support.

- Wayland will be supported by GStreamer 1.4.

- Many bug-fixes.