playbin - blank areas on screen and various questions

[Harry McKame]

First question :

I use playbin for displaying video inside a child window, passing that window's handle as video overlay (gst_video_overlay_set_window_handle). The window has a message loop that never seems to be called.

The video plays well inside its window, except for one problem : The video is displayed in the middle of the window, leaving blank space on both sides. These blank spaces are never refreshed. Under Windows they are just black, while under Linux they act as "holes" showing through whatever is beneath my application (for example the desktop).

How can I fill-up these blank spaces with a color of my choice?

Second question :

When running inside gdb, I get the message :
GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

I cannot find any problematic call to g_object_unref in my code.
How can I find where is it coming from ?

Third question :

I'm using Linux Mint where the repositories only contain GStreamer 1.8.
Are there any repositories where I can find the latest version ?