Continue the topic with Sebastian in mail list。
Hi Sebastian，
what the plan by rename playbin3 to “playbin” to totally drop the playbin support, as you can see gstplay has default use playbin3, but if use gst-launch-1.0 playbin, it will still call playbin2 which is not fully tested with new features in decoder/parse/sink for playbin3. it will cause some problems to the legacy application which still use playbin2.
Best regards
Jared Hu
playbin3 can’t be renamed to playbin because it’s not a drop-in replacement and has different API, so applications need to be ported over.
playbin will always stay around until GStreamer 2.0 (whenever that will be) for backwards compatibility reasons, but it will not got any new features and generally gets very little attention nowadays. It should continue to work as good as before (i.e. regressions should get fixed) but might not get bugfixes if playbin3 is not affected, or only playbin3 gets the bugfixes.
The same applies to decodebin and uridecodebin.