It has been quite a while since the last status update for the GStreamer Rust bindings and the GStreamer Rust plugins, so the new releases last week make for a good opportunity to do so now.
Bindings
I won’t write too much about the bindings this time. The latest version as of now is 0.16.1, which means that since I started working on the bindings there were 8 major releases. In that same time there were 45 contributors working on the bindings, which seems quite a lot and really makes me happy.
Just as before, I don’t think any major APIs are missing from the bindings anymore, even for implementing subclasses of the various GStreamer types. The wide usage of the bindings in Free Software projects and commercial products also shows both the interest in writing GStreamer applications and plugins in Rust as well as that the bindings are complete enough and production-ready.
Most of the changes since the last status update involve API cleanups, usability improvements, various bugfixes and addition of minor API that was not included before. The details of all changes can be read in the changelog.
The bindings work with any GStreamer version since 1.8 (released more than 4 years ago), support APIs up to GStreamer 1.18 (to be released soon) and work with Rust 1.40 or newer.
Plugins
The biggest progress probably happened with the GStreamer Rust plugins.
There also was a new release last week, 0.6.0, which was the first release where selected plugins were also uploaded to the Rust package (“crate”) database crates.io. This makes it easy for Rust applications to embed any of these plugins statically instead of depending on them to be available on the system.
Overall there are now 40 GStreamer elements in 18 plugins by 28 contributors available as part of the gst-plugins-rs repository, one tutorial plugin with 4 elements and various plugins in external locations.
These 40 GStreamer elements are the following:
Audio
- rsaudioecho: Port of the audioecho element from gst-plugins-good
- rsaudioloudnorm: Live audio loudness normalization element based on the FFmpeg af_loudnorm filter
- claxondec: FLAC lossless audio codec decoder element based on the pure-Rust claxon implementation
- csoundfilter: Audio filter that can use any filter defined via the Csound audio programming language
- lewtondec: Vorbis audio decoder element based on the pure-Rust lewton implementation
Video
- cdgdec/cdgparse: Decoder and parser for the CD+G video codec based on a pure-Rust CD+G implementation, used for example by karaoke CDs
- cea608overlay: CEA-608 Closed Captions overlay element
- cea608tott: CEA-608 Closed Captions to timed-text (e.g. VTT or SRT subtitles) converter
- tttocea608: CEA-608 Closed Captions from timed-text converter
- mccenc/mccparse: MacCaption Closed Caption format encoder and parser
- sccenc/sccparse: Scenarist Closed Caption format encoder and parser
- dav1dec: AV1 video decoder based on the dav1d decoder implementation by the VLC project
- rav1enc: AV1 video encoder based on the fast and pure-Rust rav1e encoder implementation
- rsflvdemux: Alternative to the flvdemux FLV demuxer element from gst-plugins-good, not feature-equivalent yet
- rsgifenc/rspngenc: GIF/PNG encoder elements based on the pure-Rust implementations by the image-rs project
Text
- textwrap: Element for line-wrapping timed text (e.g. subtitles) for better screen-fitting, including hyphenation support for some languages
Network
- reqwesthttpsrc: HTTP(S) source element based on the Rust reqwest/hyper HTTP implementations and almost feature-equivalent with the main GStreamer HTTP source souphttpsrc
- s3src/s3sink: Source/sink element for the Amazon S3 cloud storage
- awstranscriber: Live audio to timed text transcription element using the Amazon AWS Transcribe API
Generic
- sodiumencrypter/sodiumdecrypter: Encryption/decryption element based on libsodium/NaCl
- togglerecord: Recording element that allows to pause/resume recordings easily and considers keyframe boundaries
- fallbackswitch/fallbacksrc: Elements for handling potentially failing (network) sources, restarting them on errors/timeout and showing a fallback stream instead
- threadshare: Set of elements that provide alternatives for various existing GStreamer elements but allow to share the streaming threads between each other to reduce the number of threads
- rsfilesrc/rsfilesink: File source/sink elements as replacements for the existing filesrc/filesink elements