GStreamer "2.6 or Bust" 0.7.1 released

[Christian Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

The GStreamer team is happy to announce our first release in the 0.7.x
development series of the GStreamer streaming-media framework. The goal
of this release series is to stabilize it towards a 0.8 release which
will be part of the GNOME 2.6 release. This development series and the
ABI/API stable 0.8 release series that is to follow it also hoped to
increase our chances of KDE choosing GStreamer as their multimedia
framework for KDE 4.0. We are already working with KDE developers to
make that happen, with the KDE Jukebox application JuK by Scott Wheeler
already using GStreamer.

The 0.7.1 series is a development series and is aimed at developers. It
is NOT 100% API/ABI compatible with the stable 0.6.x series. This means
you can not use this release to upgrade your current GStreamer
installation and expect your GStreamer applications to keep working. It
is parallel installable with the 0.6.x series however.

This development series contains a lot of improvements compared to the
0.6.x series and is a much better foundation for building advanced video
handling applications. Below we list most of the major changes and
additions. Most are included in this first release, but not all are
complete yet as they will be in time for the 0.8.0 release.


New/improved features in 0.7.x series
      * Improved gst-launch syntax
      * Stronger more flexible debug system
      * Improved threading
      * Improved Solaris and SPARC architecture support
      * Cleaned up licensing, core 100% LGPL
      * New ASF demuxer and muxer
      * New Quicktime demuxer
      * AVI muxer/encoder
      * Working ALSA sound output, ALSA mixing support in the pipeline
      * Misc new plugins and misc dead plugins removed
      * Internationalized error handling
      * A much improved testsuite
      * improved content negotiation system
      * New interface based audio mixer support
      * New best of breed typefinding
      * Interactivity support for DVD menus and Flash animations

Applications
As mentioned there are some changes in API/ABI for this release. Many
applications will probably be source compatible between 0.6.x. and 0.7.x
however. Rhythmbox for instance works very well when compiled on 0.7.x.
Gst-player do not work accross releases however, so we will make a
separate release of gst-player with the needed fixes for it to work with
0.7.x.


GStreamer Homepage
More details on these features can be found on the project's website,
http://gstreamer.net/.

Download details
Information on tarballs etc. on http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/0.7.1/


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.


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