GStreamer "Panic Room" 0.5.2 released

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

GStreamer "Panic Room" 0.5.2 released
The GStreamer team is happy to announce our final prerelease for the
stable 0.6 series of the GStreamer streaming-media framework. The focus
of this release has been to get our audio related plugins working as
well as possible as those are what is beeing used by GNOME 2.2. modules
gnome-media and nautilus-media. 

The core of GStreamer is at this point quite complete, but there are
some rough edges we hope to iron out over the next weeks and months. A
new autoplugger should be ready shortly after 0.6.0 and we continue
working with interactivity support which is needed for DVD menus and SWF
(Flash). We also have asf support mostly working in CVS which we hope to
enable for the 0.6.1 release. 


Thread issues and GStreamer
Many of GStreamers features relies heavily on threads. Unfortunately
everything is not rosy in the Linux worlds of threads. If you have a
glibc version installed compiled with i686 optimizations (which uses a
different codepath than standard i386 glibc), there is a good chance you
will experience thread-related crashes in gstreamer-based applications.
There are a few workarounds to this available.

* You can use an i386- or i586-optimized glibc package instead.

* You can also try running the gstreamer-based applications using the
command-line option --gst-scheduler=opt, which invokes a newly created
scheduler that does not use threads. This scheduler is very new however
so you might encounter other issues when using it.
People using the Red Hat beta Phoebe are recommended to update to glibc
from Rawhide. This solves all thread issues, thanks to the new NTPL
thread library that is included there.

>From now on, GStreamer will follow a versioning scheme similar to kernel
and GTK+/GLib releases. Odd minor numbers (like for this release) will
be development releases. While GStreamer itself is very much under
development, during stable releases we will guarantee API- and
ABI-stability. The point of this development release cycle is to support
Gnome 2.1.x development.

GStreamer major-minor series versions will now be parallel-installable.
Please update your applications to check for gstreamer-0.5,
gstreamer-libs-0.5 and gstreamer-play-0.5 using pkg-config.

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. 


Updates and Enhancements
General
      * Solaris Forte fixes, GStreamer now compiles with Forte
      * FreeBSD build fixes
      * Many minor build issues fixed
      * libgstplay updated to use filesrc
      * Small ia64 buildfix

Core
      * Many refcounting issues resolved
      * Some Valgrind detected memleaks killed
      * Bugfixes to scheduler

Plug-ins
      * Fix to OSS plugin to handle blocking correctly Bug 102025.
      * Wavparse plugin fixed to handle MPEG audio
      * Swfdec plugin updated, now has sound
      * Updated ffmpeg plugin to handle xvid movies
      * modplug updated to work better with gst-player
      * alsasink 100% cpu bug fixed
      * pngenc cleaned up
      * Major updates to flash plugin

GStreamer Homepage
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. 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>
      * David I. Lehn <dlehn(AT)vt.edu>
      * David Schleef <ds(AT)schleef.org>
      * Brian Cameron <brian.cameron(AT)sun.com>
      * Joshua N Pritikin <vishnupobox.com>

Plugins and Sample Applications
      * Joshua N Pritikin <vishnu pobox com>
      * Julien MOUTTE <jmoutte(AT)electronic-group.com>
      * Cameron Hutchison <camh+gst(AT)xdna.net>
      * Ronald Bultje <rbultje(AT)ronald.bitfreak.net>
      * Steve Baker <stevebaker_org(AT)yahoo.co.uk>
      * Iain Holmes <iain(AT)prettypeople.org>
      * Jérémy Simon <jsimon13(AT)yahoo.fr>
      * Jan Schmidt <thaytan(AT)mad.scientist.com>
      * Daniel Fischer <dan(AT)f3c.com>
      * Martin Schlemmer <azarah(AT)gentoo.org>
      * Andrew Turner <zombie(AT)4free.co.nz>
      * Owen Fraser-Green <owen(AT)discobabe.net>
      * Leif Morgan Johnson <lmjohns3(AT)eos.ncsu.edu>

Misc
      * Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus(AT)gnome.org>
      * Alp Toker <alp(AT)atoker.com>
-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>