GStreamer 1.14 Working On AV1 & RTSP 2.0 Support, Promote MP3 Encoder/Decoder

GStreamer core developer Tim-Philipp Müller has provided some insight about some current and upcoming happenings for the GStreamer multimedia framework project. He also addressed the recurring comment of "write it in Rust!" for better security/safety/reliability.

Tim-Philipp Müller presented at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend during the Open Media track, which is also where we heard the AV1 status update for that promising open-source, royalty-free video codec.

The highlights of the GStreamer talk for 2018 include:

- GStreamer 1.14 is coming up "real soon now" will ship with AOMedia AV1 video support. But it's still considered experimental and the encoding is considered "still 'a bit' slow, but works."

- GStreamer 1.14 has also been working on an IPC pipeline to isolate demuxers/parsers/decoders, improvements to its tracing framework, HLSSINK2, RTSP 2.0 client/server support (Real Time Streaming Protocol 2.0), and other improvements.

- With the MP3 patents having expired, the LAME/mpg123/twolame encoders/decoders are being promoted to GStreamer's "good" plugin repository. While AC-3 patents have expired, a52dec is staying in the "ugly" repository due to liba52 being GPL licensed.

- GStreamer OpenGL integration has moved into the base code now with a stable API.

- WebRTC landed in GStreamer.

- There's always ongoing performance optimizations for GStreamer.

- The Meson build system support is now "mostly complete" with just finishing up some loose ends.

- GStreamer has no plans to switch to Rust in the short-term or to make it a hard dependency for its core components. They are though experimenting with it and potentially using it in the longer-term. But for non-core functionality there is the GStreamer Rust bindings.

Those wanting to learn more can see the PDF slide deck or watch the video recording embedded above.