14 DAY TRIAL // The hard-working team of developers behind the powerful GStreamer open-source multimedia backend, used by numerous audio/video tools and deployed by default in dozens of GNU/Linux distribution published details about the new features coming to GStreamer 1.6, a major release of the acclaimed software.
The GStreamer developers gathered together at an event called GStreamer Summer Hackfest 2015, which lasted for three days and was held in Montpellier, France, Europe. There they managed to implement a great number of new features that will be part of the forthcoming 1.6 release of GStreamer, as well as to release the first Beta build (technical version number is 1.5.90), which has been seeded to testers worldwide.
Among these great new features that will arrive in GStreamer 1.6, we can mention performance improvements for Caps negotiations, the addition of the nvenc element for recent NVIDIA GPUs, improvements to GtkGLSink, use of libav decoders for direct rendering, use of Phabricator for bug and code tracking, improvements to RTP depayloaders and payloaders, and many more.
"With the opportunity to work in the same room and enjoy the lovely city of Montpellier, developers speed up the patch reviews and fixes by being able to easily discuss them with colleagues through the high-bandwidth low-latency face-to-face protocol," says Luis de Bethencourt Guimera. "They also took the chance to discuss major features and try to settle on problems that have been waiting for design decisions for a long time in the community."
First Beta of GStreamer 1.6 is now available for testing
Those of you who are eager to take the Beta release of GStreamer 1.6 for a test drive can download the GStreamer 1.5.90 sources right now from Softpedia and start compiling/hacking. However, we remind everyone that this is not a final product, it's pre-release software that contains unresolved issues and unfinished features. Do not use it on production environments where stability is of the essence.