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The GStreamer 1.18 open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework has been officially released today and it’s a major update that adds numerous new features and enhancements.
A year and a half in the making, GStreamer 1.18 is here to replace the 1.16 series and it’s packed with lots of goodies. Highlights include a new high-level API that apps can use to transcode media files between different formats, support for capturing from the Raspberry Pi camera, better HDR (High Dynamic Range) video information representation and signaling, as well as instant playback rate change support.
GStreamer 1.18 also introduces AFD (Active Format Description) and Bar Data support, a new sink to produce DASH content, ONVIF trick modes support in the GStreamer RTSP server and client, a new DVB Subtitle encoder element, a new RTMP client source and sink element implementation, and a new SVT-HEVC-based H.265 video encoder.
Other new features include a compositor element that uses the Video Acceleration API (VA-API), support for Google’s Transport-Wide Congestion Control (twcc) RTP extension, new RTP source and sink elements that can be used to set up RTP streaming via rtp:// URIs, as well as a new overlay element for rendering a QtQuick scene on top of an input video stream.
There’s also a new AVTP (Audio Video Transport Protocol) plugin that can be used by time-sensitive apps, a new imagesequencesrc element that makes it easier to create video streams from a sequence of JPG or PNG images, and support for Scale/Speed headers in the RTSP server.
Support for TV broadcast compliant MPEG-TS muxing has been added as well in GStreamer 1.18, which also adds support for the RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) TR-06-1 Simple Profile from Video Services Forum, support for the UWP (Universal Windows Platform), and support for nested timelines in the GStreamer Editing Services.
The GStreamer 1.18 source tarball is available for download right now from the official website. However, Linux users will have to wait until the new release lands in the stable software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions before updating. Meanwhile, check out the full release notes here for more details on the new changes.
Last updated 4 years ago
