Tag: ios

OpenGL support in GStreamer

Over the last few months Matthew Waters, Julien Isorce and to some lesser degree myself worked on integrating proper OpenGL support into GStreamer.

Previously there were a few sinks based on OpenGL (osxvideosink for Mac OS X and eglglessink for Android and iOS), but they all only allowed rendering to a window. They did not allow rendering of a video into a custom texture that is then composited inside the application into an OpenGL scene. And then there was gst-plugins-gl, which allowed more flexible handling of OpenGL inside GStreamer pipelines, including uploading and downloading of video frames to the GPU, provided various filters and base classes to easily implement shader-based filters, provided infrastructure for sharing OpenGL contexts between different elements (even if they run in different threads) and also provided a video sink. The latter was now improved a lot, ported to all the new features for hardware integration and finally merged into gst-plugins-bad. Starting with GStreamer 1.4 in a few weeks, OpenGL will be a first-class citizen in GStreamer pipelines.

After yesterday’s addition of EAGL support for iOS (EAGL is Apple’s iOS API for handling GLES contexts), there is nothing missing to use this new set of library and plugins on all platforms supported by GStreamer. And finally we can get rid of eglglessink, which was only meant as an intermediate solution until we have all the infrastructure for real OpenGL support.

GStreamer 1.0 examples for iOS, Android and in general

As the folks at gstreamer.com (not to be confused with the GStreamer project) are still at the old and unmaintained GStreamer 0.10 release series, I started to port all their tutorials and examples to 1.x. You can find the code here: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~slomo/gst-sdk-tutorials/

This includes the generic tutorials and examples, and ones for iOS and Android. Over the past months many people wanted to try the 1.x binaries for iOS and Android and were asking for examples how to use them. Especially the fourth and fifth tutorials should help to get people started fast, you can find them here (Android) and here (iOS).

If there are any problems with these, please report them to myself or if you suspect any GStreamer bugs report them in Bugzilla. The XCode OS X project files and the Visual Studio project files are ported but I didn’t test them, please report if they work 🙂

GStreamer 1.2.0 released and other updates

This blog post might be a bit late but nonetheless, here are some updates that happened in GStreamer in the last week 🙂

GStreamer 1.2.0 released

On Tuesday we released GStreamer 1.2.0. This was just in time for GNOME 3.10, which depends on it and was released on Wednesday (Congrats btw! Many great improvements).

The changes between GStreamer 1.0 and 1.2 can be seen from the release announcement mail. In summary there are many, many nice new features, API improvements and even more bugfixes that we did not include in the 1.0.x bugfix releases because they required larger changes.

Following the 1.2.0 release we plan to do regular 1.2.x bugfix releases with important bugfixes, while at the same time develop new features and in general more complicated changes in the already opened 1.3 development release series (which is the GIT master branch now). The 1.3 release series will later lead to the next stable 1.4 release series. Needless to say that 1.4 will be completely backwards-compatible with 1.2 and 1.0.

GStreamer 1.2.0 binaries

Two days later on Thursday we then released the binaries for GStreamer 1.2.0 for Android (ARM), Mac OS X and Windows. This will allow to take advantage of all the new changes on these platforms too and provide a better cross-platform multimedia experience.

We also finally moved cerbero, the build system used to generate the binaries for all these platforms, to GStreamer’s freedesktop.org GIT and got rid of all the ancient 0.10 cruft that was still in there. This GIT repository is now the official place from where you can get the latest version of cerbero for building GStreamer, and will also be updated for all future 1.2.x bugfix releases. Hopefully it will also be kept up-to-date for GIT master, i.e. the 1.3 development release series.

iOS binaries and build support

Over the last days I also worked on porting the remaining parts of GStreamer 1.0 to iOS (5.1 and newer versions), and also adapted the cerbero build system to automatically build GStreamer 1.0 for iOS and create an installer package from it. iOS binaries were already available in the past from a third-party website (gstreamer.com) but only for the old and deprecated 0.10 version. My changes are based on this.

It’s now also possible to build GStreamer and all its dependencies via cerbero with the Xcode 5.0 toolchain for OS X and iOS. Thanks to more strict compiler checks and behaviour changes, some changes in the build systems and the code were necessary.

Official binaries for iOS will be provided by the GStreamer project in the next days.

Others

gstreamer-vaapi was already ported to the new 1.2 API for better hardware integration and the next release should contain it. Finally it can do all that without using unstable GStreamer API.

Also gnonlin, gst-editing-services and gst-python finally saw a 1.x based (pre-) release. The final 1.2.0 releases should be there in the next days, and hopefully a new PiTiVi release will follow soonish.

GStreamer conference 2013

In October the GStreamer Conference 2013 will happen in Edinburgh. There will be many interesting talks by the GStreamer developers but also other people and companies, who will give talks about what they achieved with GStreamer.

I’ll give a talk about how to integrate hardware capabilities into GStreamer, and which new APIs were added to make this much easier or possible at all (depending on what kind of integration is needed).