GStreamer 'Flows Like Belgian Beer' 0.3.1 released

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

The GStreamer team is happy to announce another release of the GStreamer
streaming-media framework. GStreamer now contains close to 100 plugins
for reading, writing and manipulating audio and video. However many of
these functions are under heavy development and your mileage may vary
from time to time. This means this release of GStreamer is still mostly
aimed at developers, but users wanting to experiment can test gstreamer
using its commandline interface documented in the gst-launch man page
and in the wiki.

This release of GStreamer contains many large and small improvements. A
lot of work has been done this release to create a much improved build
system. As part of this effort, the source code has been split into a
number of smaller modules, tied together with pkg-config:

    * gstreamer—just the core
    * gst-plugins—all of the plugins
    * gst-editor—the GUI pipeline editor
    * gst-oldplayer—the media player in its older, more stable
incarnation
    * gstplay—the development version of our new media player

In addition, we have a gst-all module available from CVS that bundles
the core, plugins, and editor in one easily-compiled package.

A lot of QA work has also been done, greatly reducing memleaks and
making existing plugins more robust. The GStreamer codebase has been
made more portable and it is now reported to build on Irix and Solaris
Intel in addition to Linux and FreeBSD. A lot of work has also gone into
making sure that GStreamer runs well on the newer glib 2.0 and libxml2
libraries as we move towards making that our new default build platform.
However, this release still defaults to gtk+ 1.2 and libxml1.

Another major enhancement for this release is found in the syntax of
gst-launch, our command line tool, allowing synchronous playback of
audio and video streams. Be aware however that for this release we have
changed the names of the tools from gstreamer-* to gst-*.

For those hoping for a more full featured mediaplayer bundled with this
release we must unfortunatly report that the people working on that
either got sick or got caught up at work, so this has been pushed
forward to our next release.

However, please remember that GStreamer is not a product for end users,
it's for developers who wish to write applications that have better
media handling support. If the player crashes, don't be surprised, we
probably already know why. However, if your new GStreamer-based
application crashes, we want to know about it and help you fix the
problem.
Future Plans

Our goal for the next release is stabilizing and improving the current
feature set of GStreamer further, including introducing an improved
autoplugger module for even better handling of media formats. We will
also focus more attention at our media player sample application as this
is the application most users and developers probably will use to get
aquinted with the framework.

For help building GStreamer, take a look at our build help document.
Updates and Enhancements

    * glib2 build now uses libxml2
    * glib2 build now builds gnome-vfs plugin using gnome-vfs-2
    * mikmod plugin fixed
    * documentation build partially moved to XSLT
    * new much improved build system
    * removal of obsolete plugins and examples
    * the scheduler is now pluggable
    * many improvements and bugfixes in the basic scheduler
    * comment format (mostly) changed to /* */
    * misc SPEC file fixes including moving more plugins into separate
RPMS
    * added mp3encode to the RPMS being built
    * man pages updated to give correct examples
    * irix buildfixes

More details on these features can be found, along with the release
tarballs and some RPMs, on the project's website, http://gstreamer.net/.

GStreamer is hosted on SourceForge, so support requests and bugs may be
filed as usual. Interested developers of the core library, plugins, and
applications should subscribe to the gstreamer-devel list. If there is
sufficient interest we will create more lists as necessary.

We would also like to use this chance to ask people with access to
Solaris, HP-UX, Irix and True64 to please try building GStreamer and
give us feedback build problems, patches fixing such problems are also
more than welcome.
Authors (arranged by major contribution type)

Core

    * Erik Walthinsen <omega temple-baptist com>
    * Wim Taymans <wim taymans chello be>
    * Michael Meeks <mmeeks ximian com>
    * Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>
    * Nick Blievers <nick blievers adacel com>
    * Andy Wingo <apwingo eos ncsu edu>

Plugins and Sample Applications

    * Zaheer Merali <zaheer grid9 net>
    * Arik Devens <arik gnome org>
    * Ronald Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>
    * David Lehn <dlehn vt edu>
    * Jérémy SIMON <jsimon13 yahoo fr>
    * Zeeshan Ali <zak147 yahoo com>

Misc

    * Christian Schaller <christian schaller linuxrising org>
    * Andrew Mitchell <ajmitch ajmitch dhis org>
    * wrobell <wrobell ite pl>
    * Rodney Dawes <dobey ximian com>