GStreamer Rust bindings 0.11 / plugin writing infrastructure 0.2 release

Following the GStreamer 1.14 release and the new round of gtk-rs releases, there are also new releases for the GStreamer Rust bindings (0.11) and the plugin writing infrastructure (0.2).

Thanks also to all the contributors for making these releases happen and adding lots of valuable changes and API additions.

GStreamer Rust Bindings

The main changes in the Rust bindings were the update to GStreamer 1.14 (which brings in quite some new API, like GstPromise), a couple of API additions (GstBufferPool specifically) and the addition of the GstRtspServer and GstPbutils crates. The former allows writing a full RTSP server in a couple of lines of code (with lots of potential for customizations), the latter provides access to the GstDiscoverer helper object that allows inspecting files and streams for their container format, codecs, tags and all kinds of other metadata.

The GstPbutils crate will also get other features added in the near future, like encoding profile bindings to allow using the encodebin GStreamer element (a helper element for automatically selecting/configuring encoders and muxers) from Rust.

But the biggest changes in my opinion is some refactoring that was done to the Event, Message and Query APIs. Previously you would have to use a view on a newly created query to be able to use the type-specific functions on it

let mut q = gst::Query::new_position(gst::Format::Time);
if pipeline.query(q.get_mut().unwrap()) {
    match q.view() {
        QueryView::Position(ref p) => Some(p.get_result()),
        _ => None,
    }
} else {
    None
}

Now you can directly use the type-specific functions on a newly created query

let mut q = gst::Query::new_position(gst::Format::Time);
if pipeline.query(&mut q) {
    Some(q.get_result())
} else {
    None
}

In addition, the views can now dereference directly to the event/message/query itself and provide access to their API, which simplifies some code even more.

Plugin Writing Infrastructure

While the plugin writing infrastructure did not see that many changes apart from a couple of bugfixes and updating to the new versions of everything else, this does not mean that development on it stalled. Quite the opposite. The existing code works very well already and there was just no need for adding anything new for the projects I and others did on top of it, most of the required API additions were in the GStreamer bindings.

So the status here is the same as last time, get started writing GStreamer plugins in Rust. It works well!