The GStreamer 1.8 open-source multimedia framework has been released today, March 24, 2016, after several months of hard work, and it appears to be a major release with dozens of new features.

According to the release notes, GStreamer 1.8 adds initial support for the new Vulkan 1.0 API, implements hardware-accelerated zero-copy video decoding and a new video capture source for the Android platform, and adds reverse playback support for Windows Media files like WMA, WMV, and ASF.

However, the Opus audio codec appears to be the star of this release of GStreamer, as it received numerous improvements, such as support for more than two audio channels, caps handling support for the pbutils library, new codec utility functions for the Opus header, and MPEG-TS demuxer/muxer support.

GStreamer now offers sample-accurate decoding, encoding, and transmuxing for the Opus audio codec with MPEG-TS, Matroska (MKV), Ogg Vorbis, and ISOBMFF (Quicktime/MP4) as containers. It is also important to mention here the fact that the elements of the Opus encoder and decoder were moved to gst-plugins-base.

Moreover, the Opus RTP depayloader and payloader was moved to gst-plugins-good. Among other interesting features, we can mention a new tracing system, new high-level GstPlayer playback convenience API, the adoption of the GStreamer VAAPI module, and support for asset proxy in GStreamer Editing Services.

"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 new features, bug fixes and other improvements," reads today's announcement.

You can download the GStreamer 1.8 sources right now from our website.