So this news is a couple of days old now, but I wanted to write a blog entry about the exciting release of GStreamer 1.0. When we released GStreamer 0.10 about 7 years ago we did not expect or plan the 0.10 series to last as long as it did, I think if we had it would have been called 1.0 instead of 0.10. Our caution back then was that 0.10 was a quite revolutionary version with the core of GStreamer extensively re-designed around effective use of threads and thread safety. The new GStreamer 1.0 is more of incremental improvement, cleaning up the API and making doing things modern systems expect easier and more straightforward. I think a lot of the work that went into 1.0 could be said to be based on cleaning up the awkward APIs that can evolve as you are not able to change anything existing, just add new stuff that does not affect the old.

That said there are a lot of major improvements to be seen too, with the list that Tim-Phillip Muller put together for the GStreamer website catching the major items:

• more flexible memory handling
• extensible and negotiable metadata for buffers
• caps negotiation and renegotiation mechanisms, decoupled from buffer allocation
• improved caps renegotiation
• automatic re-sending of state for dynamic pipelines
• reworked and more fine-grained pad probing
• simpler and more descriptive audio and video caps
• more efficient allocation of buffers, events and other mini objects
• improved timestamp handling
• support for gobject-inspection-based language bindings

The list can seem a bit technical and dry, but there are a lot of things that will benefit users here once plugins and applications start taking advantage of them. For instance the more flexible memory handling will improve performance when for instance running GStreamer on ARM boards like a Panda board or a Raspberry Pi. The changes will also make it a lot easier to write plugins and use plugins on PC platforms which use the GPU for decoding or encoding and that use OpenGL for rendering the playback. These things where possible with 0.10, but they required a bit more special casing and more code in the plugins and a bit more overhead in setting up the pipeline. If you want a great introduction to what is in this 1.0 release I recommend the keynote by Wim Taymans about GStreamer 1.0 and the GStreamer Status report keynote by Tim-Phillip Müller which both talk alot about the new features and the possibilities they open.

I think that the biggest change for a lot of developers though will be if they are using a language binding for their application, GStreamer 1.0 is offering Gobject introspection bindings support, which means that most bindings from now on will be using that. For Python developers like myself that is a quite big change in API. On the other hand it also does mean that porting to Python3 has become very simple. For Transmageddon I simply ran it through the Python 2to3 script and it just worked.

There are a lot of contributors to this release, and I would love to thank them all, but I think Wim and Tim also deserve a special mention as I don’t think there would be a GStreamer 1.0 without them. Wim has of course been the GStreamer maintainer for a long while and he shepherded this release from the beginning when he was the only developer working on it. Tim has been the GStreamer release manager for a long while now and are doing a wonderful job, fixing a gazillion bugs and making sure we regressions are not allowed to creep into GStreamer releases. He ended up doing a lot of heavy lifting to get the final GStreamer 0.11 test releases and the final 1.0 out the door. So a big big thanks to both of them.

Another person I want to give an extra kudos to is Bastien Nocera who have done a lot of working porting GNOME applications to GStreamer 1.0, there is and was of course a lot of other people involved in that process too, but Bastien did an incredible job working through that list and writing patches to port many of them over.

What I am really looking forward to now is the release of Fedora 18 as I think it will be the first chance for a lot of users and developers to try out all the great work that has been done on GStreamer 1.0 and porting applications over to it. I am personally targeting Fedora 18 with Transmageddon, doing my current testing and development on a F18 system, making sure things like the PackageKit integration is working smoothly.