There is a lot of new material in GStreamer 1.18 from much better Microsoft Windows support to including Intel's SVT-HEVC H.265 encoder. The highlights of GStreamer 1.18 include:
- HDR video information representation and signaling enhancements.
- Integration of the Intel SVT-HEVC encoder.
- Instant playback rate change support.
- Windows hardware-accelerated video decoding via DXVA2 / Direct3D 11. There is also a Microsoft Media Foundation plugin for video capture and hardware-accelerated video encoding on Windows. There is also support for the Universal Windows Platform.
- TV broadcast compliant MPEG-TS muxing.
- A new element to create a video stream from a sequence of PNG or JPEG images.
- A new high-level API for transcoding media files from one format to another.
- A new overlay to render a Qt Quick scene on top of a video stream.
- A VA-API compositor element has been added.
- Support for the Google TWCC RTP extension for Transport-Wide Congestion Control. Various other RTP improvements too.
- Many performance improvements.
More details on today's GStreamer 1.18 stable release via FreeDesktop.org .