The developers of the open source GStreamer multimedia framework have announced a few hours ago the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance version of the GStreamer 1.6 series.

According to the attached release notes, GStreamer 1.6.1 is here to fix numerous issues that have been reported by users since the previous release of the software, as well as to adds various under-the-hood improvements for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.

Among the most important changes, we can mention a patch for a crash that occurred when using the gst-libav encoders, lots of enhancements for Microsoft SmoothStreaming, Live DASH, and HLS streams, as well as better support for adaptive streaming protocols.

There's also support for more DASH-IF test streams, the cerbero component is now supported under Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan operating systems, the FFmpeg snapshot from gst-libav has been updated to version 2.8.1, and the bindings of the GObject-Introspection annotation feature were improved.

"The GStreamer team is proud to announce the first bugfix release in the stable 1.6 release series of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework. This release only contains bugfixes and it is safe to update from 1.6.0," reads the release announcement.

Several memory leaks were fixed

In addition to the many changes mentioned above, GStreamer 1.6.1 addresses several memory leaks, including those present in the decodebin, playbin, and playsink components, updates the reverse playback functionality to support scaletempo for storing audio pitch, and reports the right stream-time for negative applied_rate.

Last but not least, the SRTP (Secure Real-time Transport Protocol) packet validation functionality has been updated to no longer reject valid packages during decoding, and addresses an issue with the aggregator and audioaggregator components, which can now be used to produce output when required, as well as to no longer add silence at the beginning of the output.

Download GStreamer 1.6.1 right now from Softpedia.