With GStreamer 1.12's first release candidate out for testing and the final release expected soon, I thought it would be a good time to provide a brief preview of some of the (many) new features, bugfixes and improvements that will be arriving with this release. Of course, keep an eye out for the official release notes as they'll provide considerably more information around these changes.

As usual, this latest stable release will come loaded with new features, notably support for the EGL extension used by the i.MX6 Vivante proprietary driver, support for waylandsink DMABuf importation (which means you can get zerocopy media display under Wayland) and support for the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder and decoder. However, one of the higlights will undoubtedly be the addition of support for Intel's Media SDK*, the cross-platform API to access Intel's hardware accelerated video encoder and decoder functions on Windows and Embedded Linux.

Along with a large cleanup of OpenCV elements, more controls and voice activity information for webrtcdsp, and more support for 10bits and 12bits pixel formats, one of the key new features is videoconvert now supporting the multi-threaded scaling and conversion, a big plus for real-time software manipulation of 4K and 8K streams.

Python programmers will rejoice as more features are natively accessible, in particular, GstCaps describing format can now be fully programmatically modified, thanks to new handwritten overrides.

On the build and dependencies side of things, one noticeable improvement will be the change in plugin filenames to match their plugin name. This is in preparation for a new plugin interface coming in 1.14, which will allow developers to build static and dynamic plugins simultaneously. Support for full Meson has also greatly progressed, and pretty much everything will now be able to be built, with most unit tests having been integrated.

In terms of contributors, while the full list will be available with the 1.12 release notes, one highlight worth mentioning is the first ever contribution by GoPro developers, which will bring CineForm support to GStreamer.

Stay tuned for the final release of GStreamer 1.12, which should arrive in the next few weeks!

*Note: Intel recently made their Media SDK Open Source, inviting developers to contribute enhancements to make faster, more efficient video/image processing. You can read more about it here. We congratulate Intel for this milestone and look forward to seeing it ported to recent versions of the Linux kernel and other relevant drivers.