This weekend I released QtGStreamer 0.10.1, the first stable version of QtGStreamer. This release marks the beginning of the stable 0.10 series of QtGStreamer that will continue for the lifetime of GStreamer 0.10. For those of you that don’t yet know what QtGStreamer is, it is a set of libraries that provide Qt-style C++ bindings for GStreamer, plus extra helper classes and elements for better integration of GStreamer in Qt applications.

I must say thanks a lot to Mauricio, the co-developer of QtGStreamer, who helped me a lot with the design and code, to the GStreamer community, who accepted this project under the GStreamer umbrella with great enthusiasm, to Nokia for sponsoring it, to Collabora for assigning me and Mauricio to work on it and to all those developers who are already using it in their projects and have helped us by providing feedback.

The future

Development of course does not stop here. It just started. We will try to improve the bindings as much as we can by exporting more and more of GStreamer’s functionality, by adding more and more convenience methods/classes and/or gstreamer elements that ease the use of GStreamer in Qt applications and by collecting opinions and ideas from all of you out there that will use this API. This last bit is quite important imho, so, if you have any suggestions to make about things that you don’t like or things that you would like to see implemented, please file a bug to let us know.

Use in KDE

I am quite happy to see that this library already has early adopters in KDE. Apart of course from my telepathy-kde-call-ui (ex kcall), which is the “father” of QtGStreamer, QtGStreamer is also used in kamoso, a cheese-like camera app, whose authors, Alex Fiestas and Aleix Pol, have been very patient waiting for me to release QtGStreamer before they release kamoso and have also been very supportive during all this time (thanks!).

Personal thoughts

I must say this project was fun to develop. During development, I learned a lot about C++ that I didn’t know before and I also learned how GObject works, which I must say is quite interesting, although ugly for my taste. Learning more about C++ was my main source of interest from the beginning of the project, and for some period of time I couldn’t even imagine that this project would ever reach here, but I kept coding it for myself. Obviously, I am more than happy now that this finally evolved into something that is also useful for others and has wide acceptance 🙂