GStreamer 1.8 Release Notes

GStreamer 1.8.0 was originally released on 24 March 2016. The latest bug-fix release in the 1.8 series is 1.8.3 and was released on 19 August 2016.

See https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/1.8/ for the latest version of this document.

Last updated: Friday 19 August 2016, 08:00 UTC (log)

Introduction

The GStreamer team is proud to announce a new major feature release in the stable 1.x API series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and other improvements.

Highlights

• Hardware-accelerated zero-copy video decoding on Android

• New video capture source for Android using the android.hardware.Camera API

• Windows Media reverse playback support (ASF/WMV/WMA)

• New tracing system provides support for more sophisticated debugging tools

• New high-level GstPlayer playback convenience API

• Initial support for the new Vulkan API, see Matthew Waters' blog post for more details

• Improved Opus audio codec support: Support for more than two channels; MPEG-TS demuxer/muxer can now handle Opus; sample-accurate encoding/decoding/transmuxing with Ogg, Matroska, ISOBMFF (Quicktime/MP4), and MPEG-TS as container; new codec utility functions for Opus header and caps handling in pbutils library. The Opus encoder/decoder elements were also moved to gst-plugins-base (from -bad), and the opus RTP depayloader/payloader to -good.

• GStreamer VAAPI module now released and maintained as part of the GStreamer project

• Asset proxy support in the GStreamer Editing Services

Major new features and changes

Noteworthy new API, features and other changes

• New GstVideoAffineTransformationMeta meta for adding a simple 4x4 affine transformation matrix to video buffers

• g_autoptr() support for all types is exposed in GStreamer headers now, in combination with a sufficiently-new GLib version (i.e. 2.44 or later). This is primarily for the benefit of application developers who would like to make use of this, the GStreamer codebase itself will not be using g_autoptr() for the time being due to portability issues.

• GstContexts are now automatically propagated to elements added to a bin or pipeline, and elements now maintain a list of contexts set on them. The list of contexts set on an element can now be queried using the new functions gst_element_get_context() and gst_element_get_contexts(). GstContexts are used to share context-specific configuration objects between elements and can also be used by applications to set context-specific configuration objects on elements, e.g. for OpenGL or Hardware-accelerated video decoding.

• New GST_BUFFER_DTS_OR_PTS() convenience macro that returns the decode timestamp if one is set and otherwise returns the presentation timestamp

• New GstPadEventFullFunc that returns a GstFlowReturn instead of a gboolean. This new API is mostly for internal use and was added to fix a race condition where occasionally internal flow error messages were posted on the bus when sticky events were propagated at just the wrong moment whilst the pipeline was shutting down. This happened primarily when the pipeline was shut down immediately after starting it up. GStreamer would not know that the reason the events could not be propagated was because the pipeline was shutting down and not some other problem, and now the flow error allows GStreamer to know the reason for the failure (and that there's no reason to post an error message). This is particularly useful for queue-like elements which may need to asynchronously propagate a previous flow return from downstream.

• Pipeline dumps in form of "dot files" now also show pad properties that differ from their default value, the same as it does for elements. This is useful for elements with pad subclasses that provide additional properties, e.g. videomixer or compositor.

• Pad probes are now guaranteed to be called in the order they were added (before they were called in reverse order, but no particular order was documented or guaranteed)

• Plugins can now have dependencies on device nodes (not just regular files) and also have a prefix filter. This is useful for plugins that expose features (elements) based on available devices, such as the video4linux plugin does with video decoders on certain embedded systems.

• gst_segment_to_position() has been deprecated and been replaced by the better-named gst_segment_position_from_running_time(). At the same time gst_segment_position_from_stream_time() was added, as well as _full() variants of both to deal with negative stream time.

• GstController: the interpolation control source gained a new monotonic cubic interpolation mode that, unlike the existing cubic mode, will never overshoot the min/max y values set.

• GstNetAddressMeta: can now be read from buffers in language bindings as well, via the new gst_buffer_get_net_address_meta() function

• ID3 tag PRIV frames are now extraced into a new GST_TAG_PRIVATE_DATA tag

• gst-launch-1.0 and gst_parse_launch() now warn in the most common case if a dynamic pad link could not be resolved, instead of just silently waiting to see if a suitable pad appears later, which is often perceived by users as hanging -- they are now notified when this happens and can check their pipeline.

• GstRTSPConnection now also parses custom RTSP message headers and retains them for the application instead of just ignoring them

• rtspsrc handling of authentication over tunneled connections (e.g. RTSP over HTTP) was fixed

• gst_video_convert_sample() now crops if there is a crop meta on the input buffer

• The debugging system printf functions are now exposed for general use, which supports special printf format specifiers such as GST_PTR_FORMAT and GST_SEGMENT_FORMAT to print GStreamer-related objects. This is handy for systems that want to prepare some debug log information to be output at a later point in time. The GStreamer-OpenGL subsystem is making use of these new functions, which are gst_info_vasprintf(), gst_info_strdup_vprintf() and gst_info_strdup_printf().

• videoparse: "strides", "offsets" and "framesize" properties have been added to allow parsing raw data with strides and padding that do not match GStreamer defaults.

• GstPreset reads presets from the directories given in GST_PRESET_PATH now. Presets are read from there after presets in the system path, but before application and user paths.

New Elements

• netsim: a new (resurrected) element to simulate network jitter and packet dropping / duplication.

• New VP9 RTP payloader/depayloader elements: rtpvp9pay/rtpvp9depay

• New videoframe_audiolevel element, a video frame synchronized audio level element

• New spandsp-based tone generator source

• New NVIDIA NVENC-based H.264 encoder for GPU-accelerated video encoding on suitable NVIDIA hardware

• rtspclientsink, a new RTSP RECORD sink element, was added to gst-rtsp-server

• alsamidisrc, a new ALSA MIDI sequencer source element

Noteworthy element features and additions

• identity: new "drop-buffer-flags" property to drop buffers based on buffer flags. This can be used to drop all non-keyframe buffers, for example.

• multiqueue: various fixes and improvements, in particular special handling for sparse streams such as substitle streams, to make sure we don't overread them any more. For sparse streams it can be normal that there's no buffer for a long period of time, so having no buffer queued is perfectly normal. Before we would often unnecessarily try to fill the subtitle stream queue, which could lead to much more data being queued in multiqueue than necessary.

• multiqueue/queue: When dealing with time limits, these elements now use the new "GST_BUFFER_DTS_OR_PTS" and "gst_segment_to_running_time_full()" API, resulting in more accurate levels, especially when dealing with non-raw streams (where reordering happens, and we want to use the increasing DTS as opposed to the non-continuously increasing PTS) and out-of-segment input/output. Previously all encoded buffers before the segment start, which can happen when doing ACCURATE seeks, were not taken into account in the queue level calculation.

• multiqueue: New "use-interleave" property which allows the size of the queues to be optimized based on the input streams interleave. This should only be used with input streams which are properly timestamped. It will be used in the future decodebin3 element.

• queue2: new "avg-in-rate" property that returns the average input rate in bytes per second

• audiotestsrc now supports all audio formats and is no longer artificially limited with regard to the number of channels or sample rate

• gst-libav (ffmpeg codec wrapper): map and enable JPEG2000 decoder

• multisocketsink can, on request, send a custom GstNetworkMessage event upstream whenever data is received from a client on a socket. Similarly, socketsrc will, on request, pick up GstNetworkMessage events from downstream and send any data contained within them via the socket. This allows for simple bidirectional communication.

• matroska muxer and demuxer now support the ProRes video format

• Improved VP8/VP9 decoding performance on multi-core systems by enabling multi-threaded decoding in the libvpx-based decoders on such systems

• appsink has a new "wait-on-eos" property, so in cases where it is uncertain if an appsink will have a consumer for its buffers when it receives an EOS this can be set to FALSE to ensure that the appsink will not hang.

• rtph264pay and rtph265pay have a new "config-interval" mode -1 that will re-send the setup data (SPS/PPS/VPS) before every keyframe to ensure optimal coverage and the shortest possibly start-up time for a new client

• mpegtsmux can now mux H.265/HEVC video as well

• The MXF muxer was ported to 1.x and produces more standard conformant files now that can be handled by more other software; The MXF demuxer got improved support for seek tables (IndexTableSegments).

Plugin moves

• The rtph265pay/depay RTP payloader/depayloader elements for H.265/HEVC video from the rtph265 plugin in -bad have been moved into the existing rtp plugin in gst-plugins-good.

• The mpg123 plugin containing a libmpg123 based audio decoder element has been moved from -bad to -ugly.

• The Opus encoder/decoder elements have been moved to gst-plugins-base and the RTP payloader to gst-plugins-good, both coming from gst-plugins-bad.

New tracing tools for developers

A new tracing subsystem API has been added to GStreamer, which provides external tracers with the possibility to strategically hook into GStreamer internals and collect data that can be evaluated later. These tracers are a new type of plugin features, and GStreamer core ships with a few example tracers (latency, stats, rusage, log) to start with. Tracers can be loaded and configured at start-up via an environment variable (GST_TRACER_PLUGINS).

Background: While GStreamer provides plenty of data on what's going on in a pipeline via its debug log, that data is not necessarily structured enough to be generally useful, and the overhead to enable logging output for all data required might be too high in many cases. The new tracing system allows tracers to just obtain the data needed at the right spot with as little overhead as possible, which will be particularly useful on embedded systems.

Of course it has always been possible to do performance benchmarks and debug memory leaks, memory consumption and invalid memory access using standard operating system tools, but there are some things that are difficult to track with the standard tools, and the new tracing system helps with that. Examples are things such as latency handling, buffer flow, ownership transfer of events and buffers from element to element, caps negotiation, etc.

For some background on the new tracing system, watch Stefan Sauer's GStreamer Conference talk "A new tracing subsystem for GStreamer" and for a more specific example how it can be useful have a look at Thiago Santos's lightning talk "Analyzing caps negotiation using GstTracer" and his "GstTracer experiments" blog post. There was also a Google Summer of Code project in 2015 that used tracing system for a graphical GStreamer debugging tool "gst-debugger".

This is all still very much work in progress, but we hope this will provide the foundation for a whole suite of new debugging tools for GStreamer pipelines.

GstPlayer: a new high-level API for cross-platform multimedia playback

GStreamer has had reasonably high-level API for multimedia playback in the form of the playbin element for a long time. This allowed application developers to just configure a URI to play, and playbin would take care of everything else. This works well, but there is still way too much to do on the application-side to implement a fully-featured playback application, and too much general GStreamer pipeline API exposed, making it less accessible to application developers.

Enter GstPlayer. GstPlayer's aim is to provide an even higher-level abstraction of a fully-featured playback API but specialised for its specific use case. It also provides easy integration with and examples for Gtk+, Qt, Android, OS/X, iOS and Windows. Watch Sebastian's GstPlayer talk at the GStreamer Conference for more information, or check out the GstPlayer API reference and GstPlayer examples.

Adaptive streaming: DASH, HLS and MSS improvements

• dashdemux now supports loading external xml nodes pointed from its MPD.

• Content protection nodes parsing support for PlayReady WRM in mssdemux.

• Reverse playback was improved to respect seek start and stop positions.

• Adaptive demuxers (hlsdemux, dashdemux, mssdemux) now support the SNAP_AFTER and SNAP_BEFORE seek flags which will jump to the nearest fragment boundary when executing a seek, which means playback resumes more quickly after a seek.

Audio library improvements

• audio conversion, quantization and channel up/downmixing functionality has been moved from the audioconvert element into the audio library and is now available as public API in form of GstAudioConverter, GstAudioQuantize and GstAudioChannelMixer. Audio resampling will follow in future releases.

• gst_audio_channel_get_fallback_mask() can be used to retrieve a default channel mask for a given number of channels as last resort if the layout is unknown

• A new GstAudioClippingMeta meta was added for specifying clipping on encoded audio buffers

• A new GstAudioVisualizer base class for audio visualisation elements; most of the existing visualisers have been ported over to the new base class. This new base class lives in the pbutils library rather than the audio library, since we'd have had to make libgstaudio depend on libgstvideo otherwise, which was deemed undesirable.

GStreamer OpenGL support improvements

Better OpenGL Shader support

GstGLShader has been revamped to allow more OpenGL shader types by utilizing a new GstGLSLStage object. Each stage holds an OpenGL pipeline stage such as a vertex, fragment or a geometry shader that are all compiled separately into a program that is executed.

The glshader element has also received a revamp as a result of the changes in the library. It does not take file locations for the vertex and fragment shaders anymore. Instead it takes the strings directly leaving the file management to the application.

A new example was added utilizing the new shader infrastructure showcasing live shader edits.

OpenGL GLMemory rework

GstGLMemory was extensively reworked to support the addition of multiple texture targets required for zero-copy integration with the Android MediaCodec elements. This work was also used to provide IOSurface based GLMemory on OS X for zero-copy with OS X's VideoToolbox decoder (vtdec) and AV Foundation video source (avfvideosrc). There are also patches in bugzilla for GstGLMemoryEGL specifically aimed at improving the decoding performance on the Raspberry Pi.

A texture-target field was added to video/x-raw(memory:GLMemory) caps to signal the texture target contained in the GLMemory. Its values can be 2D, rectangle or external-oes. glcolorconvert can convert between the different formats as required and different elements will accept or produce different targets. e.g. glimagesink can take and render external-oes textures directly as required for effecient zero-copy on android.

A generic GL allocation framework was also implemented to support the generic allocation of OpenGL buffers and textures which is used extensively by GstGLBufferPool.

OpenGL DMABuf import uploader

There is now a DMABuf uploader available for automatic selection that will attempt to import the upstream provided DMABuf. The uploader will import into 2D textures with the necesarry format. YUV to RGB conversion is still provided by glcolorconvert to avoid the laxer restrictions with external-oes textures.

OpenGL queries

Queries of various aspects of the OpenGL runtime such as timers, number of samples or the current timestamp are now possible. The GstGLQuery object uses a delayed debug system to delay the debug output to later to avoid expensive calls to the glGet* family of functions directly after finishing a query. It is currently used to output the time taken to perform various operations of texture uploads and downloads in GstGLMemory.

New OpenGL elements

glcolorbalance has been created mirroring the videobalance elements. glcolorbalance provides the exact same interface as videobalance so can be used as a GPU accelerated replacement. glcolorbalance has been added to glsinkbin so usage with playsink/playbin will use it automatically instead of videobalance where possible.

glvideoflip, which is the OpenGL equiavalant of videoflip, implements the exact same interface and functionality as videoflip.

EGL implementation now selects OpenGL 3.x

The EGL implementation can now select OpenGL 3.x contexts.

OpenGL API removal

The GstGLDownload library object was removed as it was not used by anything. Everything is performed by GstGLMemory or in the gldownloadelement.

The GstGLUploadMeta library object was removed as it was not being used and we don't want to promote the use of GstVideoGLTextureUploadMeta.

OpenGL: Other miscellaneous changes

• The EGL implementation can now select OpenGL 3.x contexts. This brings OpenGL 3.x to e.g. wayland and other EGL systems.

• glstereomix/glstereosplit are now built and are usable on OpenGL ES systems

• The UYVY/YUY2 to RGBA and RGBA to UYVY/YUY2 shaders were fixed removing the sawtooth pattern and luma bleeding.

• We now utilize the GL_APPLE_sync extension on iOS devices which improves performance of OpenGL applications, especially with multiple OpenGL contexts.

• glcolorconvert now uses a bufferpool to avoid costly glGenTextures/glDeleteTextures for every frame.

• glvideomixer now has full glBlendFunc and glBlendEquation support per input.

• gltransformation now support navigation events so your weird transformations also work with DVD menus.

• qmlglsink can now run on iOS, OS X and Android in addition to the already supported Linux platform.

• glimagesink now posts unhandled keyboard and mouse events (on backends that support user input, current only X11) on the bus for the application.

Initial GStreamer Vulkan support

Some new elements, vulkansink and vulkanupload have been implemented utilizing the new Vulkan API. The implementation is currently limited to X11 platforms (via xcb) and does not perform any scaling of the stream's contents to the size of the available output.

A lot of infrasctructure work has been undertaken to support using Vulkan in GStreamer in the future. A number of GstMemory subclasses have been created for integrating Vulkan's GPU memory handling along with VkBuffer's and VkImage's that can be passed between elements. Some GStreamer refcounted wrappers for global objects such as VkInstance, VkDevice, VkQueue, etc have also been implemented along with GstContext integration for sharing these objects with the application.

GStreamer VAAPI support for hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding on Intel (and other) platforms

GStreamer VAAPI is now part of upstream GStreamer

The GStreamer-VAAPI module which provides support for hardware-accelerated video decoding, encoding and post-processing on Intel graphics hardware on Linux has moved from its previous home at the Intel Open Source Technology Center to the upstream GStreamer repositories, where it will in future be maintained as part of the upstream GStreamer project and released in lockstep with the other GStreamer modules. The current maintainers will continue to spearhead the development at the new location:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-vaapi/

GStreamer-VAAPI relies heavily on certain GStreamer infrastructure API that is still in flux such as the OpenGL integration API or the codec parser libraries, and one of the goals of the move was to be able to leverage new developments early and provide tighter integration with the latest developments of those APIs and other graphics-related APIs provided by GStreamer, which should hopefully improve performance even further and in some cases might also provide better stability.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this move happen!

GStreamer VAAPI: Bug tracking

Bugs had already been tracked on GNOME bugzilla but will be moved from the gstreamer-vaapi product into a new gstreamer-vaapi component of the GStreamer product in bugzilla. Please file new bugs against the new component in the GStreamer product from now on.

GStreamer VAAPI: Pending patches

The code base has been re-indented to the GStreamer code style, which affected some files more than others. This means that some of the patches in bugzilla might not apply any longer, so if you have any unmerged patches sitting in bugzilla please consider checking if they still apply cleany and refresh them if not. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

GStreamer VAAPI: New versioning scheme and supported GStreamer versions

The version numbering has been changed to match the GStreamer version numbering to avoid confusion: there is a new gstreamer-vaapi 1.6.0 release and a 1.6 branch that is roughly equivalent to the previous 0.7.0 version. Future releases 1.7.x and 1.8.x will be made alongside GStreamer releases.

While it was possible and supported by previous releases to build against a whole range of different GStreamer versions (such as 1.2, 1.4, 1.6 or 1.7/1.8), in the future there will only be one target branch, so that git master will track GStreamer git master, 1.8.x will target GStreamer 1.8, and 1.6.x will target the 1.6 series.

GStreamer VAAPI: Miscellaneous changes

All GStreamer-VAAPI functionality is now provided solely by its GStreamer elements. There is no more public library exposing GstVaapi API, this API was only ever meant for private use by the elements. Parts of it may be resurrected again in future if needed, but for now it has all been made private.

GStreamer-VAAPI now unconditionally uses the codecparser library in gst-plugins-bad instead of shipping its own internal copy. Similarly, it no longer ships its own codec parsers but relies on the upstream codec parser elements.

The GStreamer-VAAPI encoder elements have been renamed from vaapiencode_foo to vaapifooenc, so encoders are now called vaapih264enc, vaapih265enc, vaapimpeg2enc, vaapijpegenc, and vaapivp8enc. With this change we now follow the standard names in GStreamer, and the plugin documentation is generated correctly.

In the case of the decoders, only the jpeg decoder has been split from the general decoding element vaapidecode: vaapijpegdec. This is the first step to split per codec each decoding element. The vaapijpegdec has also been given marginal rank for the time being.

GStreamer VAAPI: New features in 1.8: 10-bit H.265/HEVC decoding support

Support for decoding 10-bit H.265/HEVC has been added. For the time being this only works in combination with vaapisink though, until support for the P010 video format used internally is added to GStreamer and to the vaGetImage()/vaPutimage() API in the vaapi-intel-driver.

Several fixes for memory leaks, build errors, and in the internal video parsing.

Finally, vaapisink now posts the unhandled keyboard and mouse events to the application.

GStreamer Video 4 Linux Support

Colorimetry support has been enhanced even more. It will now properly select default values when not specified by the driver. The range of color formats supported by GStreamer has been greatly improved. Notably, support for multi-planar I420 has been added along with all the new and non-ambiguous RGB formats that got added in recent kernels.

The device provider now exposes a variety of properties as found in the udev database.

The video decoder is now able to negotiate the downstream format.

Elements that are dynamically created from /dev/video* now track changes on these devices to ensure the registry stay up to date.

All this and various bug fixes that improve both stability and correctness.

GStreamer Editing Services

Added APIs to handle asset proxying support. Proxy creation is not the responsibility of GES itself, but GES provides all the needed features for it to be cleanly handled at a higher level.

Added support for changing playback rate. This means that now, whenever a user adds a 'pitch' element (as it is the only known element to change playback rate through properties), GES will handle everything internally. This change introduced a new media-duration-factor property in NleObject which will lead to tweaking of seek events so they have the proper playback range to be requested upstream.

Construction of NLE objects has been reworked making copy/pasting fully functional and allowing users to set properties on effects right after creating them.

Rework of the title source to add more flexibility in text positioning, and letting the user get feedback about rendered text positioning.

Report nlecomposition structural issues (coming from user programming mistakes) into ERROR messages on the bus.

Add GI/pythyon testsuite in GES itself, making sure the API is working as expected in python, and allowing writing tests faster.

The GES validate integration testsuite is now run as part of the GStreamer continuous integration effort.

GstValidate

• Added support to run tests inside gdb

• Added a 'smart' reporting mode where we give as much information as possible about critical errors

• Uses GstTracer now instead of a LD_PRELOAD library

Miscellaneous

• encodebin now works with "encoder-muxers" such as wavenc

• gst-play-1.0 acquired a new keyboard shortcut: '0' seeks back to the start

• gst-play-1.0 supports two new command line switches: -v for verbose output and --flags to configure the playbin flags to use.

Build and Dependencies

• The GLib dependency requirement was bumped to 2.40

• The -Bsymbolic configure check now works with clang as well

• ffmpeg is now required as libav provider, incompatible changes were introduced that make it no longer viable to support both FFmpeg and Libav as libav providers. Most major distros have switched to FFmpeg or are in the process of switching to it anyway, so we don't expect this to be a problem, and there is still an internal copy of ffmpeg that can be used as fallback if needed.

• The internal ffmpeg snapshot is now FFMpeg 3.0, but it should be possible to build against 2.8 as well for the time being.

Platform-specific improvements

Android

• Zero-copy video decoding on Android using the hardware-accelerated decoders has been implemented, and is fully integrated with the GStreamer OpenGL stack

• ahcsrc, a new camera source element, has been merged and can be used to capture video on android devices. It uses the android.hardware.Camera Java API to capture from the system's cameras.

• The OpenGL-based QML video sink can now also be used on Android

• New tinyalsasink element, which is mainly useful for Android but can also be used on other platforms.

OS/X and iOS

• The system clock now uses mach_absolute_time() on OSX/iOS, which is the preferred high-resolution monotonic clock to be used on Apple platforms

• The OpenGL-based QML video sink can now also be used on OS X and iOS (with some Qt build system massaging)

• New IOSurface based memory implementation in avfvideosrc and vtdec on OS X for zerocopy with OpenGL. The previously used OpenGL extension GL_APPLE_ycbcr_422 is not compatible with GL 3.x core contexts.

• New GstAppleCoreVideoMemory wrapping CVPixelBuffer's

• avfvideosrc now supports renegotiation.

Windows

• Various bugs with UDP and multicast were fixed on Windows, mostly related to gst-rtsp-server.

• A few bugs in directsoundsrc and directsoundsink were fixed that could cause the element to lock up. Also the "mute" property on the sink was fixed, and a new "device" property for device selection was added to the source.

Contributors

Adam Miartus, Alban Bedel, Aleix Conchillo Flaqué, Aleksander Wabik, Alessandro Decina, Alex Ashley, Alex Dizengof, Alex Henrie, Alistair Buxton, Andreas Cadhalpun, Andreas Frisch, André Draszik, Anthony G. Basile, Antoine Jacoutot, Anton Bondarenko, Antonio Ospite, Arjen Veenhuizen, Arnaud Vrac, Arun Raghavan, Athanasios Oikonomou, Aurélien Zanelli, Ben Iofel, Bob Holcomb, Branko Subasic, Carlos Rafael Giani, Chris Bass, Csaba Toth, Daniel Kamil Kozar, Danilo Cesar Lemes de Paula, Dave Craig, David Fernandez, David Schleef, David Svensson Fors, David Waring, David Wu, Duncan Palmer, Edward Hervey, Egor Zaharov, Etienne Peron, Eunhae Choi, Evan Callaway, Evan Nemerson, Fabian Orccon, Florent Thiéry, Florin Apostol, Frédéric Wang, George Kiagiadakis, George Yunaev, Göran Jönsson, Graham Leggett, Guillaume Desmottes, Guillaume Marquebielle, Haihua Hu, Havard Graff, Heinrich Fink, Holger Kaelberer, HoonHee Lee, Hugues Fruchet, Hyunil Park, Hyunjun Ko, Ilya Konstantinov, James Stevenson, Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig), Jan Schmidt, Jason Litzinger, Jens Georg, Jimmy Ohn, Joan Pau Beltran, Joe Gorse, John Chang, John Slade, Jose Antonio Santos Cadenas, Josep Torra, Julian Bouzas, Julien Isorce, Julien Moutte, Justin Kim, Kazunori Kobayashi, Koop Mast, Lim Siew Hoon, Linus Svensson, Lubosz Sarnecki, Luis de Bethencourt, Lukasz Forynski, Manasa Athreya, Marcel Holtmann, Marcin Kolny, Marcus Prebble, Mark Nauwelaerts, Maroš Ondrášek, Martin Kelly, Matej Knopp, Mathias Hasselmann, Mathieu Duponchelle, Matt Crane, Matthew Marsh, Matthew Waters, Matthieu Bouron, Mersad Jelacic, Michael Olbrich, Miguel París Díaz, Mikhail Fludkov, Mischa Spiegelmock, Nicola Murino, Nicolas Dufresne, Nicolas Huet, Nirbheek Chauhan, Ognyan Tonchev, Olivier Crête, Pablo Anton, Pankaj Darak, Paolo Pettinato, Patricia Muscalu, Paul Arzelier, Pavel Bludov, Perry Hung, Peter Korsgaard, Peter Seiderer, Petr Viktorin, Philippe Normand, Philippe Renon, Philipp Zabel, Philip Van Hoof, Philip Withnall, Piotr Drąg, plamot, Polochon_street, Prashant Gotarne, Rajat Verma, Ramiro Polla, Ravi Kiran K N, Reynaldo H. Verdejo Pinochet, Robert Swain, Romain Picard, Roman Nowicki, Ross Burton, Ryan Hendrickson, Santiago Carot-Nemesio, Scott D Phillips, Sebastian Dröge, Sebastian Rasmussen, Sergey Borovkov, Seungha Yang, Sjors Gielen, Song Bing, Sreerenj Balachandran, Srimanta Panda, Stavros Vagionitis, Stefan Sauer, Steven Hoving, Stian Selnes, Suhwang Kim, Thiago Santos, Thibault Saunier, Thijs Vermeir, Thomas Bluemel, Thomas Roos, Thomas Vander Stichele, Tim-Philipp Müller, Tim Sheridan, Ting-Wei Lan, Tom Deseyn, Vanessa Chipirrás Navalón, Víctor Manuel Jáquez Leal, Vincent Dehors, Vincent Penquerc'h, Vineeth T M, Vivia Nikolaidou, Wang Xin-yu (王昕宇), William Manley, Wim Taymans, Wonchul Lee, Xavi Artigas, Xavier Claessens, Youness Alaoui,

... and many others who have contributed bug reports, translations, sent suggestions or helped testing.

Bugs fixed in 1.8

More than ~700 bugs have been fixed during the development of 1.8.

This list does not include issues that have been cherry-picked into the stable 1.6 branch and fixed there as well, all fixes that ended up in the 1.6 branch are also included in 1.8.

This list also does not include issues that have been fixed without a bug report in bugzilla, so the actual number of fixes is much higher.

Stable 1.8 branch

After the 1.8.0 release there will be several 1.8.x bug-fix releases which will contain bug fixes which have been deemed suitable for a stable branch, but no new features or intrusive changes will be added to a bug-fix release usually. The 1.8.x bug-fix releases will be made from the git 1.8 branch, which is a stable branch.

1.8.0

1.8.0 was released on 24 March 2016.

1.8.1

The first 1.8 bug-fix release (1.8.1) was released on 20 April 2016. This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.8.0.

Major bugfixes in 1.8.1

• Fix app compilation with Android NDK r11 and newer
• Fix compilation of nvenc plugin against latest NVIDIA SDK 6.0
• Fix regression in avdeinterlace
• Fix memory corruption in scaletempo element with S16 input
• Fix glitches at the start with all audio sinks except for pulsesink
• Fix regression with encrypted HLS streams
• Fix automatic multithreaded decoding of VP8/9 video
• Fix deadlock in HTTP adaptive streams when scrub-seeking
• Fix regression in RTSP source with SRTP
• Add support for SRTP rollover counters in the RTSP source
• Add support for HiDPI ("Retina") screens in caopengllayersink
• ... and many more!

For a full list of bugfixes see Bugzilla. Note that this is not the full list of changes. For the full list of changes please refer to the GIT logs or ChangeLogs of the particular modules.

1.8.2

The first 1.8 bug-fix release (1.8.2) was released on 9 June 2016. This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.8.0.

Major bugfixes in 1.8.2

• Fix vp8enc and flacenc segmentation faults on Windows
• Fix Android build failure due to BSD sed on OS X
• Fix Android build failure with applications targetting API > 20
• Fix playback of live MS SmoothStreaming streams
• Fix various issues with vtdec and caopengllayersink on OS X
• Fix severe performance degradation in various image decoders
• Fix sample rate negotiation in opusdec
• Fix regression in typefind, causing deadlocks in some situations
• Fix mpegtsmux to set PTS on all output buffers again
• Fix extraction of frame dimensions from SDP in RTP JPEG depayloader
• Fix failure in v4l2videodec when setting of format fails after starting
• ... and many, many more!

For a full list of bugfixes see Bugzilla. Note that this is not the full list of changes. For the full list of changes please refer to the GIT logs or ChangeLogs of the particular modules.

Known Issues

• gst-rtsp-server does not take address pool configuration into account for sending unicast UDP. Bugzilla #766612

• vp8enc crashes on 32 bit Windows, but was working fine in 1.6. 64 bit Windows is unaffected. Bugzilla #763663

1.8.3

The third 1.8 bug-fix release (1.8.3) was released on 19 August 2016. This release only contains bugfixes and it should be safe to update from 1.8.x.

Major bugfixes in 1.8.3

• Fix Android build scripts on OS X and Windows
• Fix stepping in PAUSED state in certain circumstances
• Fix jackaudiosink hang when exiting
• Fix udpsrc receiving multicast packets not only from the selected multicast group
• Fix unnecessary decoding of unselected streams in GES
• Fix (multi)udpsink randomly not sending to clients
• Fix ALL_BOTH probes not considering EVENT_FLUSH
• Fix average input rate calculations in queue2
• Fix various locking issues causing deadlock in adaptivedemux
• Fix gst-libav encoders to correctly produce codec_data in caps
• Add Wayland, Windows and Rasberry Pi support to the QML GL video sink
• Add support for building with OpenH264 1.6
• Add support for controlling deinterlacing in GES video sources
• ... and many, many more!

For a full list of bugfixes see Bugzilla. Note that this is not the full list of changes. For the full list of changes please refer to the GIT logs or ChangeLogs of the particular modules.

Known Issues

• gst-rtsp-server does not take address pool configuration into account for sending unicast UDP. Bugzilla #766612

• vp8enc crashes on 32 bit Windows, but was working fine in 1.6. 64 bit Windows is unaffected. Bugzilla #763663

Schedule for 1.10

Our next major feature release will be 1.10, and 1.9 will be the unstable development version leading up to the stable 1.10 release. The development of 1.9/1.10 will happen in the git master branch.

The plan for the 1.10 development cycle is yet to be confirmed, but it is expected that feature freeze will be around late July or early August, followed by several 1.9 pre-releases and the new 1.10 stable release in September.

1.10 will be backwards-compatible to the stable 1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2 and 1.0 release series.

These release notes have been prepared by Tim-Philipp Müller with contributions from Sebastian Dröge, Nicolas Dufresne, Edward Hervey, Víctor Manuel Jáquez Leal, Arun Raghavan, Thiago Santos, Thibault Saunier, Jan Schmidt and Matthew Waters.

License: CC BY-SA 4.0