GStreamer 1.26 Release Notes

GStreamer 1.26.0 has not been released yet. It will be released in early 2025.

The latest development release towards the upcoming 1.26 stable series is 1.25.90 (1.26 release candidate 1) and was released on
23 February 2025.

## Introduction

The GStreamer team is proud to announce a new major feature release in the stable 1.x API series of your favourite
cross-platform multimedia framework!

As always, this release is again packed with many new features, bug fixes and other improvements.

## Highlights

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-   Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes

## Major new features and changes

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## New elements and plugins

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## New element features and additions

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## Plugin and library moves

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## Plugin and element removals

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## Miscellaneous API additions

GStreamer Core

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Other libs

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## Miscellaneous performance, latency and memory optimisations

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-   As always there have been plenty of performance, latency and memory optimisations all over the place.

## Tracing framework and debugging improvements

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New tracers

-   None in this release.

Debug logging system improvements

-   Nothing major in this cycle.

## Tools

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## GStreamer FFmpeg wrapper

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## GStreamer RTSP server

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## GStreamer VA-API support

GstVA

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GStreamer-VAAPI

-   The new GstVA elements (see above) should be preferred when possible.

-   gstreamer-vaapi should be considered deprecated and may be discontinued as soon as the va plugin is fully feature
    equivalent. Users who rely on gstreamer-vaapi are encouraged to migrate and test the va elements at the earliest
    opportunity.

## GStreamer Video4Linux2 support

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## GStreamer Editing Services and NLE

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## GStreamer validate

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## GStreamer Python Bindings

gst-python is an extension of the regular GStreamer Python bindings based on gobject-introspection information and PyGObject,
and provides “syntactic sugar” in form of overrides for various GStreamer APIs that makes them easier to use in Python and more
pythonic; as well as support for APIs that aren’t available through the regular gobject-introspection based bindings, such as
e.g. GStreamer’s fundamental GLib types such as Gst.Fraction, Gst.IntRange etc.

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## GStreamer C# Bindings

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-   GStreamer API added in recent GStreamer releases is now available

## GStreamer Rust Bindings and Rust Plugins

The GStreamer Rust bindings and plugins are released separately with a different release cadence that’s tied to the twice-a-year
GNOME release cycle.

The latest release of the bindings (0.23) has already been updated for the new GStreamer 1.26 APIs, and works with any GStreamer
version starting at 1.14.

gst-plugins-rs, the module containing GStreamer plugins written in Rust, has also seen lots of activity with many new elements
and plugins. The GStreamer 1.26 binaries track the 0.13 release series of gst-plugins-rs, and fixes from newer versions will be
backported as needed to the 0.13 brach for future 1.26.x bugfix releases.

Rust plugins can be used from any programming language. To applications they look just like a plugin written in C or C++.

### WebRTC

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### Other new Rust elements

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### Other improvements

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For a full list of changes in the Rust plugins see the gst-plugins-rs ChangeLog between versions 0.12 (shipped with GStreamer
1.24) and 0.13 (shipped with GStreamer 1.26).

## Build and Dependencies

-   Meson >= 1.3 is now required for all modules

-   The GLib requirement has been bumped to >= 2.64

-   liborc >= 0.4.40 is strongly recommended

-   libnice >= 0.1.22 is strongly recommended, as it is required for WebRTC ICE consent freshness (RFC 7675).

Monorepo build (née gst-build)

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-   The FFmpeg subproject wrap was udpated to 7.1

gstreamer-full

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Development environment

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### Cerbero

Cerbero is a meta build system used to build GStreamer plus dependencies on platforms where dependencies are not readily
available, such as Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS.

General improvements

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macOS

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iOS

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Windows

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-   Windows installer packages: Starting with 1.26, the default installation directory will change from C:\gstreamer to the
    Program Files folder e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\gstreamer for the 32-bit package. If you update an existing installation
    the 1.26 installers will keep using the existing folder, but if you were using C:\gstreamer we strongly recommend you
    uninstall and re-install into the new default location for security reasons.

-   Note for MSI packagers: Starting with 1.26, the installers were ported to WiX 5.0. As part of this, the property for setting
    the installation directory has been changed to INSTALLDIR, and it now requires a full path to the desired directory,
    e.g. C:\gstreamer instead of C:\.

Linux

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Android

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## Platform-specific changes and improvements

### Android

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### Apple macOS and iOS

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### Windows

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## Documentation improvements

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Contributors

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… and many others who have contributed bug reports, translations, sent suggestions or helped testing. Thank you all!

Stable 1.26 branch

After the 1.26.0 release there will be several 1.26.x bug-fix releases which will contain bug fixes which have been deemed
suitable for a stable branch, but no new features or intrusive changes will be added to a bug-fix release usually. The 1.26.x
bug-fix releases will be made from the git 1.26 branch, which will be a stable branch.

Schedule for 1.28

Our next major feature release will be 1.28, and 1.27 will be the unstable development version leading up to the stable 1.28
release. The development of 1.27/1.28 will happen in the git main branch of the GStreamer mono repository.

The schedule for 1.28 is yet to be decided.

1.28 will be backwards-compatible to the stable 1.26, 1.24, 1.22, 1.20, 1.18, 1.16, 1.14, 1.12, 1.10, 1.8, 1.6, 1.4, 1.2 and 1.0
release series.

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These release notes have been prepared by Tim-Philipp Müller with contributions from ….

License: CC BY-SA 4.0
