# Porting 0.8 applications to 0.10

This section of the appendix will discuss shortly what changes to applications will be needed to quickly and conveniently port most applications from GStreamer-0.8 to GStreamer-0.10, with references to the relevant sections in this Application Development Manual where needed. With this list, it should be possible to port simple applications to GStreamer-0.10 in less than a day.

## List of changes

- Most functions returning an object or an object property have been changed to return its own reference rather than a constant reference of the one owned by the object itself. The reason for this change is primarily thread safety. This means, effectively, that return values of functions such as `gst_element_get_pad ()`, `gst_pad_get_name ()` and many more like these have to be free'ed or unreferenced after use. Check the API references of each function to know for sure whether return values should be free'ed or not. It is important that all objects derived from GstObject are ref'ed/unref'ed using gst_object_ref() and gst_object_unref() respectively (instead of g_object_ref/unref).

- Applications should no longer use signal handlers to be notified of errors, end-of-stream and other similar pipeline events. Instead, they should use the `GstBus`, which has been discussed in Bus. The bus will take care that the messages will be delivered in the context of a main loop, which is almost certainly the application's main thread. The big advantage of this is that applications no longer need to be thread-aware; they don't need to use `g_idle_add ()` in the signal handler and do the actual real work in the idle-callback. GStreamer now does all that internally.

- Related to this, `gst_bin_iterate ()` has been removed. Pipelines will iterate in their own thread, and applications can simply run a `GMainLoop` (or call the mainloop of their UI toolkit, such as `gtk_main ()`).

- State changes can be delayed (ASYNC). Due to the new fully threaded nature of GStreamer-0.10, state changes are not always immediate, in particular changes including the transition from READY to PAUSED state. This means two things in the context of porting applications: first of all, it is no longer always possible to do `gst_element_set_state ()` and check for a return value of GST_STATE_CHANGE_SUCCESS, as the state change might be delayed (ASYNC) and the result will not be known until later. You should still check for GST_STATE_CHANGE_FAILURE right away, it is just no longer possible to assume that everything that is not SUCCESS means failure. Secondly, state changes might not be immediate, so your code needs to take that into account. You can wait for a state change to complete if you use GST_CLOCK_TIME_NONE as timeout interval with `gst_element_get_state ()`.

- In 0.8, events and queries had to manually be sent to sinks in pipelines (unless you were using playbin). This is no longer the case in 0.10. In 0.10, queries and events can be sent to toplevel pipelines, and the pipeline will do the dispatching internally for you. This means less bookkeeping in your application. For a short code example, see [Position tracking and seeking][queries-and-events]. Related, seeking is now threadsafe, and your video output will show the new video position's frame while seeking, providing a better user experience.

- The `GstThread` object has been removed. Applications can now simply put elements in a pipeline with optionally some “queue” elements in between for buffering, and GStreamer will take care of creating threads internally. It is still possible to have parts of a pipeline run in different threads than others, by using the “queue” element. See Threads for details.

- Filtered caps -> capsfilter element (the pipeline syntax for gst-launch has not changed though).

- libgstgconf-0.10.la does not exist. Use the “gconfvideosink” and “gconfaudiosink” elements instead, which will do live-updates and require no library linking.

- The “new-pad” and “state-change” signals on `GstElement` were renamed to “pad-added” and “state-changed”.

- `gst_init_get_popt_table ()` has been removed in favour of the new GOption command line option API that was added to GLib 2.6. `gst_init_get_option_group ()` is the new GOption-based equivalent to `gst_init_get_ptop_table ()`.

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