GStreamer "GEPpiness is a warm gun" 0.4.1 released [1] The GStreamer team is happy to announce another release of the GStreamer streaming-media framework. This release has mainly focused on code clean-up and rounding out of the features. Large chunks of GStreamer are API stable at this point. In preparation of a stable release, we have also done a thorough license audit to make sure that the licenses of all plug-ins are properly documented, and that as many of them as possible are available under the LGPL license that GStreamer uses. We are starting to have a really nice collection of applications under development using GStreamer. If you are looking for something specific check out our applications status page: http://www.gstreamer.net/status/?category=2 Downloading GStreamer You find information about the binaries we provide and the source tarballs at: http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/0.4.1/ Updates and Enhancements General * Further work on the Graphical Pipeline Editor, getting to be very stable and well working. * KDE/Qt bindings created for easier creation of KDE applications on top of GStreamer * General C++ bindings for use with gtkmm and other C++ projects added to gst-bind module (in CVS) * Effectv and virtualdub based plug-ins relicensed under LGPL (previously GPL) * Some manual examples updated and extracted to code (in examples/manual) Core * Many memleaks plugged * Lots of code cleaning * Many documentation improvements * Small change to Plugin API * Removed use of -Wall and -Werror from release tarball for non-gcc compilers, more permanent solution upcoming. * Old schedulers renamed: we now use basicomega as the default scheduler, with the others being fastomega, basicwingo and fastwingo. Plug-ins * BSD and Darwin cd playing * New Mixermatrix plugin added * New Flash plugin added * RTP plugin moved back to librtp and plugin now includes library code (still experimental, check configure --help on how to enable) * New v4l2 plugins * Updated v4l plugins * Improvements to dvdnav plugin * iRadio support added to gnomevfs plugin * Median video plugin updated and now working * Fixed many major bugs in the gnome-vfs library * Got rid of misleading warnings from plugins * Avi muxer much improved * Fix bug in mad plugin that caused loss of frames * mp3 typefind fixed to properly handle id3v2 tags Known Issues GStreamer currently ships with schedulers based on two cothread packages. The 'omega' cothread package is the one we have been shipping for a long time now and is still the default in this release. There are however some limitations and thread-related bugs in the omega scheduler. These limitations are not present in the 'wingo' schedulers, but unfortunately it does not work with i686 glibc at this time due to differences in the way threads are handled compared to other architectures, including i386. A new (third) scheduler (that doesn't use cothreads) is being developed. As for the bugs in the 'omega' schedulers, we did not feel they warranted not releasing 0.4.1 as they are rather obscure. For instance if you are using Rhythmbox you will need to be playing over 500 songs nonstop to trigger it. You can choose a different scheduler by passing --scheduler=(name) to any GStreamer application. Wim Taymans has started work on a new scheduler. The first part is already in CVS, but it will probably still be some months before it is ready. More details on these features can be found on the project's website, http://gstreamer.net/. Support and Bugs We use Gnome's Bugzilla for bug reports and feature requests. http://bugzilla.gnome.org The "product name" is GStreamer (capital G). Please do the following before writing a bug report : gst-feedback &> feedback 2>&1 and attach the file "feedback" to your bug report, so that we have some information useful in the debugging process. Developers GStreamer is hosted on SourceForge. All code is in CVS and can be checked out from there. Interested developers of the core library, plug-ins, and applications should subscribe to the gstreamer-devel list. If there is sufficient interest we will create more lists as necessary. We are still looking for people with access to Solaris, HP-UX, Irix and True64 that would be willing to try building and testing GStreamer. Patches fixing such problems are also more than welcome. Contributors to this release Patches to the core of Gstreamer * Wim Taymans <wim.taymans(AT)chello.be> * Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas(AT)apestaart.org> * Andy Wingo <wingo(AT)pobox.com> * Steve Baker <stevebaker_org(AT)yahoo.co.uk> * Cameron Hutchison <camh(AT)xdna.net> * Iain Holmes <iain(AT)prettypeople.org> * Ronald Bultje <rbultje(AT)ronald.bitfreak.net> Plugins and Sample Applications * Richard Boulton <richard(AT)tartarus.org> * David Lehn <dlehn(AT)vt.edu> * Jérémy Simon <jsimon13(AT)yahoo.fr> * Zeeshan Ali Khattak <zak147(AT)yahoo.com> * David Schleef <ds(AT)schleef.org> * Charles Schmidt <cbschmid(AT)users.sourceforge.net> * Goraxe &lt;goraxe(a)ntlworld.com&gt; * Colin Walters <walters(AT)gnu.org> * Kristian Rietveld <kris(AT)gtk.org> Misc * Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus(AT)gnome.org> * Tim Jansen <tim.jansen(AT)kde.org> * Leif Morgan Johnson <lmjohns3(AT)eos.ncsu.edu> * Christian Meyer <chrisime(AT)gnome.org> [1] It is a little-known fact that the Beatles decided their track listing for their albums based on a process called the 'GEP' process. After some initial problems, this worked very well. The only known failure of this process happened when George Harrison commited the out-of-place 'Within You Without You' to Sergeant Pepper without review by the other band members. This near split-up led to one of their finest songs on the world-reknowned White Album.