The open-source multimedia framework for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android now has a new major stable release, GStreamer 1.22.

GStreamer 1.22 is the result of months of hard work by developers, testers, and users in the community. They worked hard to add new features and improve performance to keep GStreamer on the cutting edge of multimedia technology.

The main highlight of this update is the AV1 video codec, a free alternative to H.26/HEVC that now supports hardware encoding and decoding through VAAPI/VA, AMF, D3D11, NVCODEC, QSV, and Intel MediaSDK.

Hardware AV1 codecs can now be used with GStreamer because they are slowly making their way into embedded systems and desktop GPUs.

And you can also find various improvements in the AV1 parser and in the MP4/Matroska/WebM muxers and demuxers.

There have been many enhancements and new features added to WebRTC, such as the capability to send or receive simulcast streams in multiple formats, as well as the implementation of bandwidth estimation (Google Congestion Control), WHIP, and WHEP.

Now events like key presses and mouse events can be leveraged using the GsTNavigationAPI, and because of this API, we now have support for touchscreen events.

This release also includes the new gst-cuda-library, which makes it simple to integrate CUDA algorithms into GStreamer pipelines, and you will find the integration with D3D11 and NVIDIA dGPU NVMM elements along with the new cudaconvertscale element to resize video frames and colour space.

For matching source and overlay elements, they have added a qml6sink element for Qt6.

GStreams supports new video formats (NV12_4L4, NV12_16L32S, NV12_8L128, NV12_10BE_8L128), and dmabuf imports more formats (Y410, Y212_LE, Y212_BE, Y210, NV21, NV61).

In addition, you will find that the vp9enc and the vp9dec support 10 4:4:4 and 12 bit formats, and apart from that, you will also notice that videoclip is capable of higher bit depth formats.

This release has a lot of changes, including support for ONVIF XML timed metadata, gapless MP3 playback, Fraunhofer AAC audio encoder HE-AAC and AAC-LD profiles, and more.

So, to read about all of these changes and bug fixes, you can check out this official release note.