Since GStreamer was mainly a Linux project it required us to port it to OS X and Windows, which we got working in late March. By July, we had GStreamer integrated in both Mac and Windows nightlies, albeit only supporting limited formats. In December, we’ve made our 1.0 release available which uses GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms.

Because of its open plugin architecture, we were able to assemble the necessary codecs to legally support playback of MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac (protected closed formats such as WMA DRM and Fairplay are still supported with additional cores).

On Linux, we are happy to announce that we’ve licensed the Fluendo mp3 decoder. Fluendo is a company that specializes in delivering multimedia products. They are also well known for their support of the development of the GStreamer multimedia framework. Fluendo also provides other GStreamer plugins to allow playback of format such as WMA on Linux for instance. You can purchase those through their online shop directly.

The community will benefit from all the hard work that went into this since we now have the foundation work in place to develop additional audio features such as normalization, cross fading and EQ. See our roadmap for more details.