Release notes for GStreamer Bad Plugins 1.3.2

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the second release of the unstable 1.3 release series. The 1.3 release series is adding new features on top of the 1.0 and 1.2 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework. The unstable 1.3 release series will lead to the stable 1.4 release series in the next weeks, and newly added API can still change until that point.

Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X and Windows will be provided separately during the unstable 1.3 release series.

The versioning scheme that is used in general is that 1.x.y is API and ABI backwards compatible with previous 1.x.y releases. If x is an even number it is a stable release series and all releases in this series will only contain important bugfixes, e.g. the 1.0 series with 1.0.7. If x is odd it is a development release series that will lead to the next stable release series 1.x+1 and contains new features and bigger changes. During the development release series, new API can still change.

"That an accusation?"

No perfectly groomed moustache or any amount of fine clothing is going to cover up the truth - these plugins are Bad with a capital B. They look fine on the outside, and might even appear to get the job done, but at the end of the day they're a black sheep. Without a golden-haired angel to watch over them, they'll probably land in an unmarked grave at the final showdown.

Don't bug us about their quality - exercise your Free Software rights, patch up the offender and send us the patch on the fastest steed you can steal from the Confederates. Because you see, in this world, there's two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.

This module contains a set of plugins that aren't up to par compared to the rest. They might be close to being good quality, but they're missing something - be it a good code review, some documentation, a set of tests, a real live maintainer, or some actual wide use. If the blanks are filled in they might be upgraded to become part of either gst-plugins-good or gst-plugins-ugly, depending on the other factors. If the plugins break, you can't complain - instead, you can fix the problem and send us a patch, or bribe someone into fixing them for you. New contributors can start here for things to work on.

Other modules containing plugins are:

gst-plugins-base

contains a basic set of well-supported plugins

gst-plugins-good

contains a set of well-supported plugins under our preferred license

gst-plugins-ugly

contains a set of well-supported plugins, but might pose problems for distributors

gst-libav

contains a set of codecs plugins based on libav (formerly gst-ffmpeg)