After the various blog posts about it, and the talk I gave at the GStreamer Conference, there was a lot of interest in the GstFilters library that I’ve been working on. The original plan was for it to get merged into gst-plugins-base, however, it seems like that’s not going to happen. The GStreamer developers would prefer seeing some of its features integrated into the core, but they don’t want the library itself. So I have finally decided to release it as a standalone package so everyone interested can already start using it.

As features from GstFilters will slowly get merged into the core of GStreamer, I will adapt the library to make use of these new features, reducing its internal code. However I believe it is still very useful to have Gstfilters as it’s a very simple library for those who are not familiar with GStreamer. Also the concept of the ‘filters’ is very different from the GstElements because an element can only be added once in a pipeline but filters can be added any number of times in a pipeline (a GstFilter doesn’t represent an actual element, it’s more like a helper function for “create and link these elements for me”). Also the points I’ve made about the steep learning curve and the robustness checks will still be valid even after the Gst core makes dynamic pipeline modifications easier.

GstFilters are now released and will be hosted on freedesktop.org under Farstream’s project. While Farstream users will be the most interested in this library and it is very useful for VoIP/Farstream users, it can also be used for non VoIP applications.

On a similar note, the Farsight-Utils library and API that I presented at the GStreamer Conference has been modified to make it even simpler. The library has been renamed into Farstream-IO since it basically takes care of all the Input/Output to the Farstream conference. The new API is based on a single object now, a FsIoPipeline that you create (which is a subclass of GstPipeline) and to which you register the FsConference/FsSession/FsStream. All the methods from the previous Farsight-Utils classes (FsuConference, FsuSession and FsuStream) will stay the same but will be merged into this single FsIoPipeline class, making everything easier and you’d only need to keep track of a single object.

The FsIo API will be merged into Farstream and released for the next version.

Here is the link to the new GstFilters page : http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GstFilters 

And you can get the release tarball from here : http://freedesktop.org/software/farstream/releases/gstfilters/

And browse its documentation here : http://www.freedesktop.org/software/farstream/apidoc/gstfilters/