Comment 60 for bug 1051559

Sorry I'm late to the discussion. There's something that hasn't been said that I want to clarify:

GStreamer does take ABI compatibility very seriously. 0.10 was released in 2005 and we broke ABI compatibility for the first time now with 1.0. When we do break ABI compatibility, we make sure that older and newer versions are parallel-installable. This was the case for 0.8 vs 0.10 and it's the case today with 0.10 vs 1.0.

There's a patch in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806917 to support GStreamer 1.0. I'm going to review it in the next few days and try to get it landed. Keeping compile time compatibility with 0.10 and 1.0 should be relatively easy.

If people think that runtime compatibility with both 0.10 and 1.0 is essential, I can look into that too. We could dinamically probe and load GStreamer or even have two distinct backends using MPAPI.

About the security concerns, the upstream gst community is fairly receptive to any kind of patches, and there's some overlap with debian/ubuntu/fedora developers, so those distro usually get the latest and greatest gst fairly quickly. In addition to that, we could potentially consider importing the ogg/webm/h264 gst plugins in m-c so there's even more control over those.