Qt Multimedia Prepares For Qt 6 With Rewritten GStreamer Backend, Other Big Changes

Qt Multimedia should return for Qt 6.2's release later this year and is perhaps the module changing the most in its transition from Qt5 to Qt6.

Qt Multimedia has been one of the many missing modules currently from Qt 6.0~6.1 while not only has it been ported to Qt 6 now but has been seeing some radical improvements.

Lars Knoll outlined that Qt Multimedia with Qt 6 has API improvements, a redesigned internal architecture, intentionally limiting Qt Multimedia to one back-end per platform at compile-time rather than its former plug-in architecture, and other improvements to make the code easier to maintain.

The new Qt Multimedia has a number of API additions to increase its usefulness, support was added for multiple audio/video/subtitle streams when playing back media, improved meta-data support for audio/video files, a rewritten video output pipeline, built-in support for more uncompressed video formats, greater support for hardware accelerated video decoding, removal of the radio API, and a fully rewritten GStreamer back-end.

More details on the forthcoming Qt Multimedia support for Qt 6 can be found via this mailing list post.