Editing GStreamer (section)

===Early days===
Erik Walthinsen founded the GStreamer project in 1999. Many of its core design ideas came from a research project at the [[Oregon Graduate Institute]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://lwn.net/Articles/411761/|title=GStreamer: Past, present, and future|last=Edge|first=Jake|date=26 October 2010|website=[[LWN.net]]|access-date=15 May 2022}}</ref> [[Wim Taymans]] joined the project soon thereafter and greatly expanded on many aspects of the system. Many other software developers have contributed since then.

The first major release was 0.1.0 which was announced on 11 January 2001.<ref name="0.1.0">{{cite web |url=https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=Pine.LNX.4.21.0101101700180.17206-100000%40alpha.temple-baptist.com&forum_name=gstreamer-announce |title=GStreamer "Slipstream" 0.1.0 released |date=11 January 2001 |access-date=3 November 2010 |archive-date=11 November 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121111134106/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=Pine.LNX.4.21.0101101700180.17206-100000@alpha.temple-baptist.com&forum_name=gstreamer-announce |url-status=live }}</ref> Not long after, GStreamer picked up its first commercial backer. Towards the end of January 2001, they hired Erik Walthinsen to develop methods for embedding GStreamer in smaller ([[cell phone]]-class) devices. Another RidgeRun employee, Brock A. Frazier, designed the GStreamer logo. RidgeRun later struggled financially and had to lay off its staff, including Erik Walthinsen. GStreamer progress was mostly unaffected.

The project released a series of major releases with 0.2.0 coming out in July 2001, 0.4.0 in September 2002, and 0.8.0 in March 2004. During that period the project also changed its versioning strategy and while the first releases were simply new versions, later on the middle number started signifying release series. This meant the project did release a string of 0.6.x and 0.8.x releases which was meant to stay [[binary compatible]] within those release series. Erik Walthinsen more or less left GStreamer development behind during this time, focusing on other ventures.

All release series, the project face difficulties. Every series is not very popular in the Linux community mostly because of stability issues and a serious lack of features compared to competing projects like [[Xine]], [[MPlayer]], and [[VLC media player|VLC]]. The project also suffers a lack of leadership as Wim Taymans, the project lead since Erik Walthinsen had left, had largely stopped participating.