[gst-devel] GStreamer 'GEPpiness is a warm gun' 0.4.1

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

GStreamer "GEPpiness is a warm gun" 0.4.1 released [1] 

The GStreamer team is happy to announce another release of the GStreamer
streaming-media framework. This release has mainly focused on code
clean-up and rounding out of the features. Large chunks of GStreamer are
API stable at this point. In preparation of a stable release, we have
also done a thorough license audit to make sure that the licenses of all
plug-ins are properly documented, and that as many of them as possible
are available under the LGPL license that GStreamer uses. 

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: 
http://www.gstreamer.net/status/?category=2

Downloading GStreamer 
You find information about the binaries we provide and the source
tarballs at: 
http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/0.4.1/


Updates and Enhancements 
General 

* Further work on the Graphical Pipeline Editor, getting to be very
stable and well working. 

* KDE/Qt bindings created for easier creation of KDE applications on top
of GStreamer 

* General C++ bindings for use with gtkmm and other C++ projects added
to gst-bind module (in CVS) 

* Effectv and virtualdub based plug-ins relicensed under LGPL
(previously GPL) 

* Some manual examples updated and extracted to code (in
examples/manual) 

Core 

* Many memleaks plugged 
* Lots of code cleaning 
* Many documentation improvements 
* Small change to Plugin API 
* Removed use of -Wall and -Werror from release tarball for non-gcc
compilers, more permanent solution upcoming. 
* Old schedulers renamed: we now use basicomega as the default
scheduler, with the others being fastomega, basicwingo and fastwingo. 

Plug-ins 

* BSD and Darwin cd playing 
* New Mixermatrix plugin added 
* New Flash plugin added 
* RTP plugin moved back to librtp and plugin now includes library code
(still experimental, check configure --help on how to enable) 
* New v4l2 plugins 
* Updated v4l plugins 
* Improvements to dvdnav plugin 
* iRadio support added to gnomevfs plugin 
* Median video plugin updated and now working 
* Fixed many major bugs in the gnome-vfs library 
* Got rid of misleading warnings from plugins 
* Avi muxer much improved 
* Fix bug in mad plugin that caused loss of frames 
* mp3 typefind fixed to properly handle id3v2 tags 

Known Issues 

GStreamer currently ships with schedulers based on two cothread
packages. The 'omega' cothread package is the one we have been shipping
for a long time now and is still the default in this release. There are
however some limitations and thread-related bugs in the omega scheduler.
These limitations are not present in the 'wingo' schedulers, but
unfortunately it does not work with i686 glibc at this time due to
differences in the way threads are handled compared to other
architectures, including i386. A new (third) scheduler (that doesn't use
cothreads) is being developed. 

As for the bugs in the 'omega' schedulers, we did not feel they
warranted not releasing 0.4.1 as they are rather obscure. For instance
if you are using Rhythmbox you will need to be playing over 500 songs
nonstop to trigger it. You can choose a different scheduler by passing
--scheduler=(name) to any GStreamer application. 

Wim Taymans has started work on a new scheduler. The first part is
already in CVS, but it will probably still be some months before it is
ready. 

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. 

http://bugzilla.gnome.org 

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> 
    * Andy Wingo <wingo(AT)pobox.com> 
    * Steve Baker <stevebaker_org(AT)yahoo.co.uk> 
    * Cameron Hutchison <camh(AT)xdna.net> 
    * Iain Holmes <iain(AT)prettypeople.org> 
    * Ronald Bultje <rbultje(AT)ronald.bitfreak.net> 

Plugins and Sample Applications 

    * Richard Boulton <richard(AT)tartarus.org> 
    * David Lehn <dlehn(AT)vt.edu> 
    * Jérémy Simon <jsimon13(AT)yahoo.fr> 
    * Zeeshan Ali Khattak <zak147(AT)yahoo.com> 
    * David Schleef <ds(AT)schleef.org> 
    * Charles Schmidt <cbschmid(AT)users.sourceforge.net> 
    * Goraxe <goraxe at ntlworld.com> 
    * Colin Walters <walters(AT)gnu.org> 
    * Kristian Rietveld <kris(AT)gtk.org> 

Misc 

    * Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus(AT)gnome.org> 
    * Tim Jansen <tim.jansen(AT)kde.org> 
    * Leif Morgan Johnson <lmjohns3(AT)eos.ncsu.edu> 
    * Christian Meyer <chrisime(AT)gnome.org> 

[1] It is a little-known fact that the Beatles decided their track
listing for their albums based on a process called the 'GEP' process.
After some initial problems, this worked very well. The only known
failure of this process happened when George Harrison commited the
out-of-place 'Within You Without You' to Sergeant Pepper without review
by the other band members. This near split-up led to one of their finest
songs on the world-reknowned White Album.