Collabora's 16 contributors delivered significant improvements to GStreamer 1.28, covering hardware acceleration, AI/ML inference integration, HDR and colorimetry support for Wayland, zero-copy pipeline optimizations via DMA-buf and udmabuf, MPEG-5 LCEVC codec extensions to H.265/H.266 and encoding support, and RTP/WebRTC interoperability fixes including better LiveKit compatibility. Additional work includes V4L2 driver optimizations, a Vulkan AV1 decoder, AVB streaming support, and numerous bug fixes across the stack.
Table of contents
Bringing AI to the Media PipelineUsing your hardware to its full potentialThe DMA-buf RevolutionHDR and the Quest for Color Accuracyudmabuf: Zero-copy for Software DecodersMPEG-5 LCEVC: an enhancement codecRTP and WebRTCAVTP: video streaming over AVBAnd much moreLooking aheadRelated PostsRelated PostsQuestions this post answers
What HDR improvements were added in GStreamer 1.28?
GStreamer 1.28 adds Wayland color protocol support in sinks for transmitting colorimetry to the compositor, HDR10 metadata parsing, correct HDR metadata extraction from AV1 streams, and 10-bit RGB support across Wayland and OpenGL elements. These changes collectively enable high-fidelity HDR pipelines on the Linux desktop. Developers building HDR media pipelines on Linux track GStreamer releases like this on daily.dev.
What MPEG-5 LCEVC codec support was added in GStreamer 1.28 compared to 1.26?
GStreamer 1.26 introduced LCEVC decoding with H.264 as the base codec. GStreamer 1.28 extends this to H.265 and H.266 as base codecs, and adds LCEVC encoding support via V-Nova's encoder SDK, developed in cooperation with V-Nova. Engineers evaluating next-gen codec support in GStreamer pipelines find relevant release coverage on daily.dev.
How does udmabuf improve software decoding performance in GStreamer?
The udmabuf (userspace DMA-buf) API lets standard system memory be treated as a DMA-buf, so software-decoded frames can be imported directly by a GPU or display controller without an intermediate copy. GStreamer 1.28 adds a udmabuf allocator and improvements to glupload and waylandsink to enable this path, benefiting devices without dedicated hardware decoders. Teams optimizing zero-copy media pipelines on embedded Linux hardware follow GStreamer developments on daily.dev.