A month after the previous 1.24.3 version, the GStreamer team announces the latest update to the stable 1.24 release series of the widely used cross-platform multimedia framework: GStreamer 1.24.4. This version focuses solely on bug fixes and security enhancements, ensuring a robust and secure experience for all users.
Users on any version of the 1.24 series can safely upgrade to 1.24.4 without concerns for compatibility or stability disruptions. Major bug fixes and improvements include:
- Audio Enhancements: The audioconvert tool now supports configurations with over 64 audio channels, enabling the handling of more complex audio projects.
- Video Decoding Improvements: The avvidec now efficiently handles multi-threaded decoding of I-frame codecs such as DV Video without dropping frames, which is crucial for maintaining video playback quality.
- Live Pipeline Support: The mpegtsmux has been updated to correctly time out in live pipelines, particularly benefiting sparse streams like KLV and DVB subtitles.
- Hardware Decoding: Fixes in vtdec resolve deadlocks during shutdown and changes in format or resolution, which are commonly encountered in adaptive streaming scenarios like HLS and DASH.
- Format and Resolution Handling: Significant fixes have also been made to prevent deadlocks in vtdec during shutdowns and when changing formats or resolutions. These are scenarios common with streaming protocols like HLS/DASH.
- Codec Enhancements: Updates to vah264enc and vah265enc improve timestamp handling and ensure that IDR frames are generated on force-keyunit-requests instead of I frames, which is vital for video encoding stability.
- User Interface and Playback: The gtk4paintablesink has seen improvements, including support for fullscreen mode and integration with gst-play-1.0, which enhance the overall user interaction with multimedia content.
- WebRTC Enhancements: The webrtcsink now supports insecure TLS and has improved error and VP9 handling, making it more robust for web-based multimedia applications.
- Hardware Acceleration Fixes: The v4l2codecs decoder prioritizes DMA_DRM capabilities, which address playback issues in playbin3 and optimizes performance on supported hardware.
- Platform Compatibility: Updates include avoiding using private APIs on iOS, which helps maintain compliance and functionality across different operating systems.
Alongside these highlighted updates, this release also brings numerous other bug fixes, memory leak patches, and stability enhancements, ensuring a more reliable environment for developing and running multimedia applications.
Binaries for Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Windows will be released shortly. For more information about all changes in GStreamer 1.24.4, refer to the release announcement or review the full changelog.
