The GStreamer team has released GStreamer 1.28.6, the latest stable bug-fix update in the 1.28 series of the popular cross-platform multimedia framework.
A notable playback fix corrects playbin and playbin3 stalling when previously disabled subtitles were re-enabled. The update also resolves a core regression occurring when a pad was relinked while modified sticky events were pushed.
GStreamer’s WebRTC and real-time streaming components also receive improvements. The DTLS and WebRTC implementations were adjusted to resolve compatibility issues with OpenSSL 4.0.0, and the RTP retransmission bitrate estimation was corrected. The release also fixes RTP depayloading of SMPTE ST 291 frames with multiple ancillary data packets.
Another notable addition is H.266 (Versatile Video Coding) muxing support in GStreamer’s Rust-based MP4 and fragmented MP4 muxers. These muxers now handle input buffers without timestamps more reliably, and hlssink3 receives a similar improvement for timestamp-less input.
For WebRTC-based applications, webrtcsink now handles H.264 profile and level negotiation more accurately. Support was also added for NVIDIA’s nvv4l2h265enc hardware H.265 encoder, common on NVIDIA embedded platforms.
The release further improves handling of SMPTE ST 2038 ancillary metadata and closed-caption combining. A bug affecting the insertion of Supplemental Enhancement Information data into H.265/HEVC video streams with an alpha channel has also been fixed.
Hardware-accelerated video workflows receive several corrections. GStreamer 1.28.6 improves coded-buffer size handling in VA-API encoders and fixes issues in the Windows D3D11 WinRT screen-capture element, including incorrect capture-height calculation.
The textaccumulate element has been refined to produce text output more consistently and handle French punctuation better. Though small, these changes should improve pipelines involving speech recognition, translation, subtitle generation, and speech synthesis.
Importantly, developers building GStreamer against the recently released FFmpeg 9.0 will find necessary compatibility fixes in this update. On the packaging side, Cerbero now avoids incorrectly including static .lib files for Rust plugins in Windows packages, fixing a regression that caused binary size growth. The bundled SRT library recipe was also updated to version 1.5.6.
As usual for a maintenance release, GStreamer 1.28.6 includes numerous additional bug fixes, build corrections, memory-leak fixes, and general stability and reliability improvements across the framework.
For additional details, see the announcement. Binaries for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows will be available soon on the project’s downloads page.
