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The GStreamer team announced today the release and general availability of GStreamer 1.20 as the latest stable series of this powerful and widely-used open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework.
GStreamer 1.20 is here one and a half years after GStreamer 1.18 to introduce major new features like WebM Alpha decoding support, video decoder subframe support, multi-threaded video conversion and mixing in the compositor, MPEG-2 and VP9 Linux stateless support, as well as smart encoding (pass through) support for VP8, VP9, and H.265.
It also introduces GstPlay, a new high-level playback library to replace GstPlayer, AV1 and MPEG-2 support to the Windows Direct3D11/DXVA decoder, audio support for the WPE (WebKit Port for Embedded) web page source element, and CUDA-based video color space convert, rescale, upload and download elements.
Furthermore, the Matroska (MKV) and MP4 muxers have been updated in this release to support profile, level and resolution changes for H.264 and H.265 input streams. Also, there’s a new VA-API plugin implementation with more decoders and new postproc elements.
Other noteworthy changes include unified support in RTP depayloader and payloader base classes, SMPTE 2022-1 2-D Forward Error Correction support, runtime compatibility support for libsoup2 and libsoup3, as well as NVIDIA memory:NVMM support for OpenGL glupload and gldownload elements.
On top of that, GStreamer 1.20 allows you to tweak encoding profiles with additional application-specified element properties. Under the hood, there’s support for building against the latest FFmpeg 5.0 multimedia framework, and there’s improved support for custom minimal GStreamer builds.
Many WebRTC improvements are present as well in the new release, along with support for handling video decoder automatic packet-loss, data corruption, and keyframe requests for RTP, WebRTC and RTSP.
Last but not least, GStreamer 1.20 brings a new AppSink API that can be used to fetch events, adds many new Rust plugins and updates the Rust bindings, and improves AppSrc with support for more configuration options for the internal queue.
You can download GStream 1.20 right now from the official website if you fancy compiling it yourself. Otherwise, you should wait until it arrives in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution to update from the 1.18 series. Meanwhile, check out the full release notes for an in-depth look at the new features.
Last updated 2 years ago
