GStreamer 1.12 is a massive release that introduces numerous new features and improvements, but the biggest of them all is support for Intel’s Media SDK (Software Development Kit) thanks to the implementation of a new msdk plugin to access the hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding of various Intel GPUs on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. The x264enc component received an update in GStreamer to be capable of using multiple x264 library versions, each one being compiled for a specific bit depth at runtime, thus providing support for multiple bit depths. There’s also multi-threaded conversion and scaling support implemented in the videoconvert and videoscale components, which could be quite useful when dealing with higher resolution video streams.